Theodora Jane Long Hodges, ("Teddy"), was born May 8th, 1922, in Springfield, Massachusetts, to John Franklin Long and Amelia Agnes Hall Long. She died peacefully on June 19, 2022 in her home in Berkeley, California, shortly after her hundredth birthday.
Teddy was a respected academic and the matriarch of a large family. She was married to Joseph Lawson Hodges, Jr., a professor of Statistics at the University of California at Berkeley. She is survived by five children: Grace Eleanor ("Lennie"), Nancy, Joseph, John, and William Alexander "Sandy" who live in California, Idaho, and Arizona. Her eleven grandchildren and sixteen great grandchildren live in California, New York, and British Columbia. She is also survived by her sister Helen who lives in Massachusetts, and to whom she remained close throughout her life. Their youngest sister Nancy was lost to cancer in her fifties, a great loss to Teddy and to the whole family.
For most of her childhood Teddy lived in Brockton, Massachusetts, where her father was a director of the Brockton YMCA. Teddy was valedictorian of her high school class and earned a scholarship to Radcliffe College, where she was Phi Beta Kappa and graduated Magna Cum Laude in 1944. She was offered an internship at the National Institute for Public Affairs in Washington D.C. and went on to work for various government agencies during the war.
After VJ Day, a young Joe Hodges traveled to the Pentagon to write a report on work he had done in Guam during the war. Teddy's colleague and roommate, Audre Marcus, had known Joe from their undergraduate days at Berkeley, and introduced him to Teddy, saying, "This is the man you're going to marry." Audre's prediction turned out to be correct.
Their first dates were folk concerts and hiking on the Appalachian Trail with friends. Joe returned to Berkeley to continue his postgraduate work and Teddy flew out to meet him in September of 1946. They were married in a double ceremony with Teddy's younger sister Nancy, at Mount Vernon Methodist Church. Teddy sewed her own wedding dress and organized the wedding, including a reception for 100 guests, on $100 which she borrowed from her father.
They did not set up housekeeping directly after their marriage; Teddy went back to Washington DC. Her boss Harry Clement at UNRRA had asked her to help with the postwar transition of that agency to a new boss and affiliation. At only 25, she was apparently too valuable for her boss to do without!
Between 1948 and 1951, Teddy had her first four children, with Sandy, her youngest, born in 1955. She found the house on Campus Drive which was to be her and Joe's home for the rest of their lives. Her children, their spouses and her grandchildren remember so many warm family gatherings there over the more than half a century which followed.
When Teddy’s children were young, holidays were spent at Joe's parents’ home in Buckeye, Arizona, with Joe's sisters and numerous cousins. There were camping trips to the Sierra Nevada every summer. In Joe's sabbatical year 1956 the family traveled to Stockholm, Sweden, where they lived for a year. During these years while her children were young, Teddy did more and more volunteering, in the school library and as a girl scout leader.
As the children grew older, she took classes at UC Berkeley, earning a PhD in Library Science. She went on to teach classes in indexing and cataloging, and served as Assistant Dean of the library school. She co-authored and edited many books, and did the index for others, including one by the philosopher Susan Sanger.
Both of Teddy’s parents, who had spent decades overseas as her father served as a YMCA director in the Phillipines and in Cairo, lived to their hundredth year. Teddy lost Joe to heart failure in 2000.
After retirement she began taking classes in Latin, took in and lovingly cared for rescue dogs, and hosted monthly afternoon pot luck gatherings at her home until well into her nineties. During those years she also made room in her house for a succession of foreign students who remained loyal friends to Teddy throughout her life.
Teddy had strong beliefs, standing up firmly for human rights and fairness for all. She took a keen interest in world events, engaging thoughtfully in discussions with family and friends. The phrase "never met a stranger" applied to Teddy; her family remembers fondly how she would start a conversation with anyone, anywhere. She enjoyed doing crossword puzzles, reading mystery stories, knitting sweaters for her grandchildren, traveling to visit her sister in Massachusetts, and remodeling her home. She will be much missed.
