Woodstock, VT--Constance "Connie" Hendren Fitz, former state film librarian for the state of Connecticut, died at Woodstock Terrace Monday February 27, 2017, surrounded by her three children. A third generation Washingtonian, Mrs Fitz was born in 1926 at Columbia Hospital for Women, the first child of Paul Hendren and Bryson Pettit Hendren. She attended Georgetown Visitation convent school, which she reached by street car from her home on Belmont Road NW. Growing up in a navy family, she lived on and off in Washington from 1926 to 1942. She told many stories of Washington life, including of the Knickerbocker Theater roof collapse after a heavy snowfall at which her father assisted victims and of a World War II call to turn in all privately held weapons. Her mother had a handgun to turn in and not wanting to be found carrying a concealed weapon, twirled it on her finger as she rode the bus into town to the consternation of other passengers.

In spring 1942, she was one of the initial group of girls invited to a tea for military daughters to volunteer in various ways to help the war effort. The group was called JANGO (Junior Army Navy Girls Organization). Eight girls volunteered to help in hospitals to alleviate wartime nursing shortages. They worked at Doctor's Hospital emptying bed pans after school and on Saturdays. The girls were told they needed to wear a uniform and she was put on the JANGO uniform committee. She and a friend thought the uniforms looked dreary at Woodward and Lothrop's department store, but found instead a denim jumper with red and white striped piping. A dozen jumpers were ordered for the JANGO group to wear over a white blouse. This outfit was a predecessor to the development of the Candy Striper uniform and name. That summer she caught pneumonia, probably from the hospital work.

After the start of World War II, she and her mother and brother moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. There she became a Civilian Air Raid Observer monitoring all-night to spot enemy planes flying over. She also learned to fly. At 16, she enrolled in 1943 at the University of North Carolina on an accelerated program for high schoolers initiated during World War II. Her studies ended on her mother's premature death later that year while her father Rear Admiral Paul Hendren was at sea, commanding the USS Philadelphia, a cruiser which saw heavy action off North Africa and Sicily. She went to live in New Orleans with her maternal aunt and uncle who had been called back into military service from retirement.

She traveled widely growing up, including a trip with her mother and uncle by freighter through the Panama Canal to reach California where her father was stationed. In the early 1950's before the interstate highway system, she single-handedly drove her two small children from Kansas to the east coast to follow her husband to Germany. In the McCarthy era, her husband was court martialed, accused of being a Communist for disputing strategies on use of atomic weapons on civilian populations. Upon acquittal, he was sent to Thule, Greenland for a year. During this time, she volunteered in the Girl Scouts and as a Red Cross swimming instructor at Fort Sill, OK. She traveled with her husband an Army artillery officer who was stationed in Kansas, Germany, Missouri, Texas, Oklahoma, Illinois, California, and again Germany. While they were stationed in Germany, she eagerly learned the German language and culture and got to know German citizens, which was not the norm for US military personnel of the time.

When her husband later went to the Army Language School in Monterey to learn Spanish (in preparation for the Bay of Pigs invasion), she enthusiastically learned Spanish. When the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba failed, she and her husband were stationed a second time in Germany.

In the 1960's she became curator for education at the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she ran the docent program and concurrently completed her undergraduate degree in Russian history at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, while raising three children. She later earned a Master of Library Science from Connecticut State College in New Haven and specialized in managing audiovisual library collections. She served as state film librarian for the state of Connecticut until she retired in 1982. She wrote a thesis on the life and work of Asenath Nicholson (no relation) who was active in writing about and helping the Irish at the time of the Great Potato Famine.

In 1982 She retired and married Dr. Reginald Fitz at the Woodstock Universalist Chapel. They lived for many years at Catnip Hill in South Pomfret, then moved into Woodstock after remodeling a mansard roofed house on Linden Hill. She was active in the League of Vermont Writers, serving as vice president and president, and helped edit Vermont Voices and Vermont Voices II, anthologies of the group's work which included short stories which she wrote. For a number of years she wrote a gardening column for the Vermont Standard called "Touch the Earth" and also published articles in the New York Times on gardening and thrift stores. She was active in the local arts group Pentangle's efforts to renovate the town theater in Woodstock. She served on the board of the Norman Williams Memorial Library in Woodstock and for several years organized annual book sale fundraisers to benefit the library and help furnish a Mission style reading room. She was a board member of the Lucy Mackenzie Humane Society. In addition to gardening and raising a number of Jack Russell terriers with names inspired by golf, she was a thrift store and yard sale shopper extraordinaire. She had a gift to spot a first edition or a piece of tarnished silver that most people would have walked right by. She shared her enthusiasm for art, music and creative enterprises with her children and modeled a positive, engaged way of living.

Her marriages to Hubert Maurice Nicholson Jr and Desmond McCarthy ended in divorce prior to her marriage to Dr. Reginald Fitz. Dr. Fitz died in May 2013. She has three children from her first marriage, Catherine Nicholson Donnelly of University Park, MD, James S. P. Nicholson of Carencro LA and Charlotte NC and Ann Yelin of Concord MA, a brother Paul M Hendren of Greensboro NC and three grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held on Saturday April 1st at 2:00pm at the Universalist Chapel in Woodstock Vermont.

In lieu of flowers, she would have been pleased by donations to the Lucy Mackenzie Humane Society of Windsor VT or Listen Community Services, Lebanon NH.