Nancy Dickescheid Bentley was born May 10, 1947 to Joseph Dickescheid and Winifred Kraft in Staten Island, New York. She has been with her partner Ron Barrett since 1988 and will also be survived by several cousins and cats. She grew up on Staten Island and attended Notre Dame Academy High School, graduating in 1964. That year, she and friends saw the Beatles from the front row of Carnegie Hall on Feb. 12 and auditioned for Phil Spector. Once a year, the high school would take us to the Metropolitan Opera, which inspired a life long love of that genre.
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Photo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmCM2S8FlCc
After 2 years of college, she decided to move to London in 1968, where she was employed as a typesetter. She returned to the U.S. in 1971 and moved to St. Marks Place in the East Village, which at the time was a folk music nexus and she saw Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and others in small venues. She continued to work as a typesetter in New York City, and her local bar at the time was Hillys on the Bowery, which later became the center of punk rock CBGBs. She later moved to Brooklyn.
In 1975 she was offered a position at Graphic Arts Center in Portland Oregon to set up a modern cold type system which replaced hot type. In Portland, she met her husband Tom. Tom’s engineering degrees took them to Hewlett Packard in Silicon Valley CA, and Nancy realized at that time that her future was in computer science. She commuted two years from Sunnyvale California to UC Santa Cruz, where she acquired a computer science degree. Her first position was with a small company, and for the second, she was employee #146 for start-up Sun Microsystems in Mountain View, the 7th person hired to do phone support.
After a divorce and 10 years in CA, she returned to Portland, Oregon and became the System Engineering Manager for Sun in Portland. While there she lived in a wonderful bungalow off Hawthorne Blvd. and acquired a fantastic 1930s cabin 20 minutes from skiing on Mt. Hood.
She reacquainted with Ron Barrett, who had worked at Tektronix with Tom, and who at the time had planted a 15 acre vineyard in Chehalem Valley. OR. Nancy decided to leave Sun and went to the Cordon Bleu cooking school and became a certified chef. Nancy and Ron lived in Oregon, and then, looking for a new challenge, in 1997 they moved to Ripley Ohio, bought a 125 acre farm, planted an all vinifera vineyard and built Kinkead Ridge Winery. Ron was the winegrower and Nancy was the Managing Partner. Kinkead Ridge wines were internationally recognized in reference books such as Opus Vino, by British wine publisher Tom Stephenson, and medalled in prestigious competitions, e.g. the Cabernet Franc won a Double Gold medal at the AWS.
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Search www.youtube.com for Kinkead Ridge for interesting winery/vineyard videos.
When retirement loomed, the winery was sold and renamed Lowell-Marie. It was re-sold to Northern Yankee Moonshine. The vineyard was sold, and sadly was ripped up and totally replanted with corn. Nancy and Ron then retired to a 4 acre lovely home in Cleveland, North Carolina near Winston-Salem.
Her personal hobbies included rock climbing, skiing, pheasant hunting, stained glass artist, web site designer, banjo playing and chef.
As well as living in England, she has travelled to Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Grenada, Martinique, Mexico, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Portugal, Spain, France, Malta, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Morocco, Belgium, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Canada. Over the years, she and Ron have had many cats.
Burial will be next to her mother: Hortonville Cemetery, New York.
After demise, in lieu of flowers, donations to Georgetown Ohio Animal Shelter (cats only), Georgetown OH www.bchs.org
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Website: tarheelstate.wixsite.com/ron-nancy