Anita Louise Nevison (née Porter) died on November 26, 2021 at her home in Talent, Oregon after a brief illness.  Her daughter Cynthia, son Alex and roommate and caregiver Jann Shapro were with her at the end.  She was preceded in death by her husband William (Bill) Nevison and her sister Marian Porter.  She is survived by her two children, two grandchildren Russell and Martin Baker, son-in-law David Baker, and brother Henry Porter and sisters Andrea Lingenfelter and Laura Fabian.   Her cause of death was liver failure, which was diagnosed only ~ 3 weeks before her death.  She was 82 years old.

Anita was born in Buffalo, NY on April 20, 1939, the oldest daughter and second child of Ann and James Porter.  She attended the Buffalo Seminary, where she was at the top of her class, and Cornell University, from which she graduated early, in 3.5 years.  An avid reader all her life, she majored in English.  She moved to Boston after graduation and worked for a publishing firm and received a Master’s in education from Harvard University.  In 1962 she enlisted in the newly established Peace Corps and went out to the University of California, Berkeley for her training.  There, instead of shipping out to Africa, she met and married Bill Nevison, whom she had briefly known at Cornell.

The newlyweds lived in Berkeley while Bill finished his degree and where their two children were born, then moved to Concord, California.  Anita was active in the local community, serving on the Concord Planning commission and was instrumental in the preservation of Lime Ridge, a series of foothills near Mt. Diablo.  She and her children frequently walked their dogs on Lime Ridge and other oak woodlands in the East Bay Regional Parks District.  Anita also served as a trustee of the Eugene O’Neill foundation in Danville and on the national board of Zero Population Growth.

Anita was a homemaker when her children were young then worked for a variety of social service agencies including Planned Parenthood, Social Advocates for Youth and the Family Stress Center.  She served as executive director for the latter two organizations after earning her master’s in accounting.  She finished her career in the private sector, first as the manager of Rogue’s Gallery, an art gallery specializing in wildlife prints, which she and Bill co-founded, and finally as the manager of Crown Books in Dublin.

She left the San Francisco Bay Area and moved to Ashland, Oregon in 2001.  After several years of searching, she found her dream house in the country, on 5 acres of land, in Talent, Oregon.  She devoted the remainder of her life to creating her estate, with colorful flower beds, composting, productive garden and orchard, and a beautiful back porch that looked over the Rogue Valley and her neighbor’s alpaca, who liked to graze in her pasture.  She was inspired to live in the country by happy memories of her youth, during the war years, when her family spent their summers on a farm in Pendleton, near Buffalo.  They raised vegetables and livestock and the children swam in the adjacent Erie Canal.

Another childhood memory that strongly influenced her later life was the guest house her parents owned at the Chautauqua Institute near Jamestown, NY.  She spent summers there as a teenager and worked as a waitress at Bemus Point on Lake Chautauqua during her Cornell years.  She later bought a small condo in the Chautauqua Institute in the 1990s, which she and Bill visited every year for ~ 10 years until they moved to Oregon.  She continued to host occasional family reunions in Chautauqua for her extended family in later years.  Chautauqua represented the best in culture, learning and community for Anita.  She was a generous and kind spirit who valued learning and knowledge, loved her family, animals and nature, and tried to help others and make the world a better place.