Joanne Perry

BETHESDA, MD. - BETHESDA, MD and BANGOR, ME - Joanne Springer Perry, 94, formerly of Bangor, Orono and Ormond Beach, Florida, died on December 12, at the Carriage Hill nursing facility in Bethesda, Maryland. She was born in Bangor on August 8, 1926, the eldest child of Paul Clayton Springer and Morita Pickard Springer. She graduated from Bangor High School in 1942, and from the University of Maine in Orono in 1946, where she was a music major and a member of Phi Beta Kappa and of the Alpha Omicron Pi sorority. She received a master's degree in mathematics there in 1947, and immediately began a 45 year career as a mathematics professor, first for 30 years at the University of Maine at Orono, followed by 15 years on the faculty of Embry Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida.
She married Charles Hodges Perry of Bangor on June 20, 1951, at All Souls Congregational Church, where she was a lifelong member and where she and Chuck began dating in college fellowship. They had one daughter, Victoria Joanne Perry, born in 1956. In 1955 Joanne and Chuck moved from Bangor to Orono, where they remained until 1977 when they moved to Ormond Beach, Florida. Several years after Chuck's death in 2010, Joanne moved to Bethesda, Maryland, to the home of her daughter Victoria and son-in-law Adnan Mazarei.
Music was important to Joanne. She played the piano, pipe organ, and the bass violin including, in her earlier life, with the Bangor Symphony. She was active in All Souls Congregational Church, and later in the Seabreeze United Church of Daytona Beach, Florida. She was a lifelong member of the P.E.O. Sisterhood, along with her sisters, mother-in-law, and sisters-in-law, first in Bangor and then in Florida. Joanne much enjoyed meeting the local members of that organization after her move to Florida. In addition to her husband and daughter, though, Joanne's primary relationships were with the members of her extended family. Her sister, Jackie in particular, was her closest companion throughout their lives, including in Ormond Beach, where Jackie and her husband, Dick moved several years after Joanne and Chuck. After the birth of Joanne's grandchildren, they became a major part of her life, and a source of reciprocal joy.
Throughout her life in Maine, Joanne especially enjoyed summertime at her family's woods camp on East Grand Lake, where she swam, canoed, and played a mean game of croquet. After her marriage to Chuck, she also spent happy time at his family's cottage on the coast, in Brooksville, where she became an avid boater. After their retirement, she and Chuck spent several months a year there, a tradition which she was able to continue until just a few years before her death.
She is survived by her daughter, Victoria Perry of Bethesda, Maryland and her husband, Adnan Mazarei; grandchildren, Pamela S. Trio and her husband, Casey Trio, Ruth Perry Summers, Harry Charles Summers; and step-granddaughter, Soraya Mazarei; brother, William H. Springer and sister-in-law, Christine Springer; numerous nieces and nephews; caregiver and friend, Cheryl Ellis. In addition to her parents and her husband, Charles Perry, she was predeceased by her sisters, Jacqueline S. Sprague and Diana S. Gordon, and their husbands, Richard Sprague and Harry Gordon; and her husband's siblings, Anne Morse, Polly Eaton and husband, Franklin Eaton, Barbara Martin, and Alfred M. Perry, Jr.
Burial at Mount Hope Cemetery in Bangor, and a service of remembrance will be held at a later time, in light of the present pandemic.