Wright Family Stuff

Anne Kathryn Wright (named for her paternal and maternal grandmothers respectively) was born in Bremerton WA and grew up in Silver Spring. She lived briefly in Massachusetts before moving to San Diego in 1975 with her first husband Doug Deneen and baby daughter Jesse. Anne married Ken Mayer in 1987, the same year she passed the California bar exam. After Ken died in 2014, Anne lived briefly in Burien WA, before spending several years in the heart of Des Moines’ rich pageant. In 2021, she followed her now-grown daughter Jesse and son-in-law Simon to Cabot Cove in the hills near Colorado Springs CO.

Anne left us peacefully on the evening of June 12, 2023 after an all-too-brief battle with cancer. As one of us siblings wrote … and then there were seven.

First, and most appropriately, Anne wrote her own obituary. Pieced together from various notes and writings, and included at the beginning of this testament , it tells the story of her life, perfectly showcases her wit, sarcasm, and irreverence, and at the same time continuously catches the reader off guard with surprisingly deep insights, loving thoughts, and remembrances that pop up unexpectedly in the midst of her musings. The testament also includes Anne’s personal recollection of each of us siblings, written in her own inimitable style as she spent time remembering and reviewing her life and things important to her. These vignettes serve as individual and intimate good-byes to each of us and demonstrate her desire to make sure that each of us knew we were individually important to her. This testimony provides a full picture of the Anne we all knew and loved.

Then there is music, which was always a part of Anne’s life. While in San Diego, she and Ken amassed a large collection of CDs reflecting her many-sided musical taste. It’s not surprising, then, that she used music to help her understand and come to terms with her illness. Herewith a playlist she created during her final weeks and months. Like her testament above (but not for casual listening) its songs display the breadth and depth of her personality.

Finally, and in addition to Music, Anne loved words. She read extensively and, whenever she encountered a particularly memorable, profound, or pithy poem, quote, or statement, she wrote it down. She would recall these quotes as needed to punctuate her writings and conversations. We have collected many of these notes, in no particularly meaningful sequence, in this list of quotes and aphorisms for your reading pleasure.

Charlie was born in Washington DC in 1948 and grew up in Silver Spring MD. As a college boy, rather than partying, Charlie spent his weekends caving in West Virginia. Here’s a brief memoir of his adventures underground formatted for tablet, also available in large print and in e-pub format. After graduating from the University of Maryland in 1971 with a BS in Aerospace Engineering, he married Kathy Haber and joined the US Navy as a Naval Flight officer. The Navy sent them to Guam where children Terri and Katie Mitchell were born, and Charlie enjoyed duty in Vietnam, the Philippines, Japan, and other locations in the western Pacific. Charlie and Kathy have documented these years in a memoir. Before completing his Navy service in 1977, he returned to school at the University of West Florida to earn a BS degree in Computer Science. Subsequently, he enjoyed long a career as a software developer, systems engineer, and program manager developing and integrating information systems for the US Department of Defense while working for Sperry Univac, Unisys, INRI, Logicon, and Northrop Grumman. Retired in 2008, Charlie and Kathy now live in Reston VA, where they enjoy traveling and visiting their two daughters and seven grandchildren.

Born in the Naval Hospital in Annapolis in 1944, George is member of the Naval Academy class of 1966, a former Navy fighter pilot, a former private pilot, and a retired college professor. He now lives in the Mercy Ridge retirement community with his wife, Patricia. Their children are Bob, Matt, Mike, and Philip.

George played baritone saxophone for some twenty years in MoodSwings, a Baltimore big band. The highlight of that experience was playing the White House. He also has an interesting story to tell about his last flight as a Navy fighter pilot.

George's public key is available here.

Our youngest sibling, Herbert Francis Wright II (named for his paternal grandfather) was born prematurely on May 19, 1961, and died the same day. We have no pictures of him, and only the oldest among us even remember the trip to the funeral home to say goodbye as he lay in his tiny casket.

John died on October 11, 2020, age 68. Unable to travel during the pandemic, we remembered him with a virtual wake. He is also remembered by his family and friends on a memorial website.

A University of Maryland graduate, John worked for 32 years in DoD intelligence. He retired to North Carolina in 2007 with wife Rita Pelczar. He developed gardens, raised hops, volunteered locally, and entertained a constant stream of visitors. John’s greatest joys were watching his children Alice, Curtis, and Jack develop into adults, holding each new grandson, and enjoying the mountain view from his porch at “Shangri-la” as he sipped an evening “medicinal.”

Married to Greg. Mother of Joe and Monica.

Katie attended St. Bernadette's grade school (grades 1-8) and Regina High School in Hyattsville (grades 9-12). She got her AA degree from Montgomery College in Rockville and continued at the University of Maryland where she graduated with a "General Studies" BA degree which was essentially a way to forgo declaring a major.

After three years of living in sin, Greg and Katie eloped and were married in Berkeley Springs. West Virginia at Rob and Sandy Campbell's house; Rob is Greg's cousin. Upon revealing the news to her parents, her father said, "Oh, thank god, I don't think I could have taken another wedding!" They moved to a tiny, one-bedroom apartment in Hyattsville MD where Joe was born in 1984. Soon after they moved to a townhouse in the Greenbelt MD Cooperative, Greenbelt Homes Inc (GHI). Katie continued to work while Greg took a break from his remodeling business and watched baby Joe. Monica was born in 1987 at which time Greg and Katie switched roles with Greg working and Katie watching the kids. In 1986, they heard about a group that bought and subdivided a tract of land in Greenbelt. As a carpenter by trade, Greg had always wanted to build his own home, so they jumped at the chance and grabbed one of the last two available lots. They began the happy process of designing the home of their dreams. In May 1988, Greg began working full-time on their home, building it in nine months. They moved into their new home at 156 Research Road on New Years Eve 1988. On New Years Day they awoke in their new home to a yard magically decorated by an overnight snow storm.

After working as a secretary, at her brother Charlie's insistence that she would make a great computer programmer, Katie searched for work in that field. This was in the early days of that field before the proliferation of computer science degree programs and professional certifications. Companies would hire and train people in the field. Katie joined a company as a technical writer (hired solely on the basis of one technical writing course taken in college that her father insisted she list on her resume). For any employee that could pass a computer aptitude test, the Company offered a free, year-long computer programming training course at night followed by a computer programmer position. The aptitude test was three hours long and had only three questions, all logic questions, no specific technical knowledge required. Katie used all three hours but scored 100% on the test. After the training she began working as a programmer on mainframes using COBOL and JCL software. She worked on various government contracts for Departments of Energy and Labor to name a few. She eventually made the jump from government contractor to government employee when she was hired by the Office of the Comptroller for the Currency (OCC) which is part of the Treasury Department. Katie thrived at the OCC and was able to make the necessary technical transitions from mainframes and sequential programming to PC's and database programming and finally web-based design. Katie loved those 20+ years of technical work. But due to the need for competent Project Managers, she eventually got pushed into that side of the work and out of the technical work that she loved. While she could be depended on to deliver her projects on time and on budget, Katie found the work to be tedious and mostly joyless. Out of boredom, she made the jump to the OCC's Cybersecurity department but again was relegated to the bureaucratic side of things (compliance work) instead of the more engaging and fun technical work which was reserved for contractors.

Katie was thrilled to be able to retire when her first grandson was born in 2016 and has not looked back since. Katie and Greg watch the grandkids weekday afternoons and have spent many a summer day with them around the kiddie pool and sprinkler. Katie has also become active in volunteer work in several local Greenbelt groups and one county-wide group, the Prince George's County Lynching Memorial Project (PGC LMP) for which she is co-secretary. The PGC LMP is affiliated with the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI). Both organizations are committed towards educating people about our nation's full history, especially with respect to slavery and racial terror lynchings, and how that history continues to shape our present. Katie became more attuned to the issues of racial justice as she raised her family in Prince George's County, a majority Black county. In retirement, Katie and Greg also took two eye-opening car trips to various Civil Rights related sites. The first, In 2018 was to Memphis TN and MS. Highlights included: the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis which includes the Lorraine Motel where MLK Jr. was assassinated, the flat cotton fields of the Mississippi delta, hearing music at "Red's," one of the last surviving juke joints in Clarksdale MS, memorial for Fannie Lou Hamer in Ruleville MS, Bryant's Grocery where Emmett Till was accused of flirting with the white shopkeeper, Medgar Evers' Home in Jackson MS where he was assassinated in 1963. The second in 2019 was to GA and AL. Highlights included: Easter service at MLK's Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta GA, Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham AL where a bomb killed 4 young girls, Selma AL where we walked across the Edmund Pettus bridge, the site of "Bloody Sunday" in 1965 and most of all, EJI's powerfully moving Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery AL. It was this visit to EJI's museum and memorial that inspired Katie to become active in the PGC LMP.

Married to Gary Toth. Mother of Leilah Lyons and Valerie Dixon.

Martha grew up in Silver Spring MD, graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park, and married her high school sweetheart, Gary Toth. With a draft lottery number that guaranteed Vietnam Era military service, Gary joined the U.S. Air Force in 1971. During two years of helicopter pilot training, he and Martha moved every few months to another middle-of-nowhere “garden spot.” During three years living near Clark Air Base in the Philippines, she went from an unpaid teaching aide to a teacher and on-site administrator of an adult high school on base.

When they returned to the States in late 1976, Martha was pregnant with their daughter, Leilah, and Gary switched from Search and Rescue to Special Operations. Anxious to leave the service before he got killed, he took an offer from Ford to work in Dearborn as an engineer. Their daughter Valerie was born in Michigan, where Martha occupied herself with volunteer work for several years, first creating and running a parent advocacy group for the education of gifted children, then volunteering 20 hours a week in a gifted program classroom. She eventually served for a bit over 25 years on her local school board, during which she tried to become a lay expert on the theory and practice of teaching and learning.

She returned to paid work at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1991, where she did writing, editing, publication design, and database management for the education outreach program of an NSF-funded research center. She was also an early webmaster as the Web succeeded Gopher, in the era of Mosaic and modems, building an expansive site of hands-on science activities.

A few months after Martha was laid off by the university (the minute education outreach was no longer required), Gary was alerted to his Stage IV cancer by a sudden loss of speech—due to the largest of “innumerable” brain metastases. For nearly three years, he went through every possible standard (and a few experimental) treatments. He was able to see Leilah marry and Valerie graduate from college. Both girls were graduate students in Ann Arbor during much of this period, which was a blessing to all. Martha was able to work part-time for the non-profit formed by her education outreach group to continue their mentoring programs and, with two colleagues, write a book on the most important lessons they learned during 20-some years of such work.

After losing Gary in 2005, she did some international traveling—to Jordan and Paris with sister Anne, and to Denmark, Greece, and Australia with her daughters. After Leilah and Brett settled in the Seattle area, Valerie and Darius settled in the DC Metro area, and both couples bought homes and had children, Martha realized they were never coming back to Michigan and chose to move to Seattle herself. She lives a few blocks from Leilah, Brett, and granddaughter Suren, and (except during pandemics) visits a few times a year with Valerie, Darius, and grandsons Demetrius and Marcus—now living in Silver Spring near her starting place.

Married to Rocky. Mother of Laurie Cuttino, Stoney, and Beth Pepper.

Married to Joe. Mother of Angie, Cassie Eschen, and Sam.

Married to Jerry McGinn. Mother of Chris McGinn and Tim McGinn.

Monica recently marked the end of 22.5 years working at her current job and just shy of 40 working years as a speech language pathologist. Check out her retirement party.