Obituary of Ann Curtis Wood

Ann Curtis Wood was born on November 17, 1920, the eldest daughter of Janet and Fred Curtis. She was raised in Granby, Massachusetts and attended Middlebury College where she majored in English literature and Chemistry (following in her father’s footsteps). Because she and her brother Mike had always loved planes as children and because she was going to college during the war years, she learned to fly as part of her college education. Upon her graduation in 1942, she worked at Arthur D. Little in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and assisted with surveillance in night flights over Boston Harbor, scouting for enemy submarines. When the war was over, she declared that she was “no good” at chemistry and worked briefly as a secretary, followed by a longer stint in Europe entertaining the troops in Munich and in Hamburg. When she came back, she lived in New York for a while and then moved to Palo Alto, California, with her brother Nevius who was in the Navy. In 1957 she attended graduate school in library science at Berkeley where she met her husband, Thor Wood (d. 1988). Together they had two daughters, Elizabeth and Frances. They started out in Princeton, NJ and in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, where she worked as a public librarian, before moving to New York City in 1965. There she worked in a medical library, at a financial firm, and then at the National Bureau of Economic Research and at Citibase, the research arm of Citibank. She and Thor loved music and theater and took full advantage of all the city offered. After retiring, she volunteered at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden library for many years. In 2012, she moved to Alexandria, Virginia, to be near her daughter. She was an avid and eclectic reader. Over the course of her long life she traveled many times to Europe, to Egypt, and to Central and South America, where she had a particular passion for archeology and Mayan culture. In addition to her daughters and her brother Nevius, she is survived by her sister Phoebe, a grandson, and many wonderful nieces and nephews and their children.