CORSON, BARBARA ANN (HAND)

August 29, 1925 –November 10, 2017
Barbara Corson passed away peacefully at dawn on November 10, resting at her daughter’s home in Grand Junction, Colorado. She remains forever loved and remembered.
Eldest of the three daughters of Robert B. Hand and Kathryn MacMahan Hand, Barbara was known as Babs to her family and girlhood friends in Cape May, New Jersey, where she grew up riding her bike, walking, enjoying the beach, and listening to the stories of her parents, grandmothers, aunts and great-aunts, whose living memories of history and the community stretched well back into the nineteenth century. Times were difficult for her family during the Great Depression. They lost their home and sometimes struggled to make ends meet. But the stories of her family and youth Barbara passed along, in turn, to her children and grandchildren were always full of love, humor and the daily adventures of life in Cape May.
After graduating from Cape May High School in 1943, Barbara worked as an electrical draftsman in Philadelphia during World War II, where she loved going to concerts and experiencing life in the big city with friends while living at the YWCA. She saved up enough money to spend a semester at Mary Washington College, in Virginia, but couldn’t afford to continue her education and instead returned to Cape May, where she married James W. Corson in 1946. Jimmy, who grew up “in the country” six miles away in Lower Township, had met Barbara during high school but they began to date and correspond after he graduated, spent a year at Rutgers and then served in the Army Air Corps during the war.
Taking advantage of Jim’s benefits under the G.I. Bill, Barbara and Jimmy traveled west to Colorado and New Mexico, where Barbara worked as a telephone operator while Jim went to college. Later, they started a family while Jim worked as a high school science teacher and seasonal park ranger, with one daughter born when they were stationed for the summer at Grand Canyon National Park and two more while they were living in New Mexico, where they homesteaded on five acres near Farmington. When Jim left teaching, and took a permanent position as a park ranger, the family began a thirty-year journey of exploration in the National Park Service, with assignments at Mt. McKinley, Alaska, Glacier Park, Montana, Sequoia Park, California, Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts, and Colonial National Historic Park, Virginia. The park assignments were interspersed with multiple postings in Washington, D.C. and one in Boston, Massachusetts. Two more children joined along the way, another daughter while on an extended stay in Cape May, between assignments, and a son in California. Through it all Barbara enjoyed the variety of environments, people and scenery the family experienced, and devoted herself to infusing her children with her love no matter where they found themselves in life.
Barbara and Jim retired to Cape May in the 1980s, where she took care of her aging father and worked several years as a tour guide and assistant manager at the Mid-Atlantic Center for the Arts & Humanities – an opportunity that allowed her to develop talents as a public speaker and guide she hadn’t known she had, and to learn more about the town she loved and share stories about it with visitors. She also began writing a family history, to pass along to her children, and enjoyed traveling.
In 1990, Barbara and Jim moved to Grand Junction, Colorado to be nearer to the kids. Barbara continued to work on her history project, did some volunteer work, and traveled. She became quite a whitewater river runner, with the inspiration of one of her daughters, and made trips to Europe with her daughters and sister as well as many trips throughout the west and visits back to Cape May. She was also an enthusiastic grandmother – two granddaughters joined the family before she retired, and later three grandsons and a great-grandson.
Through 71 years of thick and thin, Barbara and Jimmy stayed together. It wasn’t always easy, and they didn’t always see things the same way, but they both loved their children and grandchildren and enjoyed quiet nights at home, where they shared a fondness for reading and time playing Scrabble and, in the end, supported each other through life.
Barbara is survived by her husband, Jim, her sister, Connie, her daughters, Paula, Sue, Lorna and Ann, her son, Steven, five grandchildren, Rebecca, Jennifer, Mack, Jansen and Grant, and one great-grandchild, Zachary. In passing, she joins her other sister, Nancy. One of Barbara’s earliest memories was of helpfully taking Nancy for an unsupervised walk on the boardwalk in Cape May while both were still toddlers in the late 1920s, just 14 months apart in age. She recalled, with retrospective amusement, watching from the boardwalk while her aunt drove up in a rush from one direction and a policeman drove up in a rush from the other, to retrieve them. Today we remember Barbara, our loving, kind, and thoughtful mom, wife, sister and grandmother, and hope that she and Nancy are enjoying another long walk on the boardwalk together, hand in hand and joyfully unsupervised forever.
No immediate service is planned, but the family encourages donations in memory of Barbara Corson to the 2020 Society fund at the Mid-Atlantic Center for the Arts & Humanities, www.capemaymac.org or 1048 Washington St., P.O. Box 340, Cape May, NJ 08204.