GINNY BELL MARCH 12, 1926 – Dec. 26, 2020
Laura Virginia (Ginny) Lotz Bell, died of natural causes December 26, 2020 at the age of 94 at The Retreat Healthcare in Rio Rancho, NM.
Ginny was born to Etha and Paul Lotz, on March 12, 1926 in Queens, New York. The second of three girls, Ginny grew up in Port Washington on Long Island, NY. Her brilliant, charismatic father, Paul Lotz, was a great influence in her life. A paint chemist in New York City, Paul was intrigued by the culture and geography of the southwestern United States and drove his family out west many summers in the early 1940’s to visit the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley. He befriended the Native American people, once suggesting and providing more durable paint for their Pueblo doors.
Ginny was a natural athlete and began dancing at a young age. She spent her youth going to dancing school and performing in various venues. She was small and a quick study and so often filled in for other dancers. In high school the dancers were paired with the football players who could lift the dancers with ease. Ginny, in turn, went to their football games and thus began a lifelong love of football resulting in her becoming a die-hard Denver Broncos fan.
Ginny received a Bachelor’s Degree in Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin in 1948. She moved to Los Alamos, NM in the early 1950’s and worked as a chemist for Los Alamos National Laboratory. She met the love of her life, George Bell, through the Los Alamos Mountaineers and they married in 1956. Although their wedding date happened to be Friday the 13th, it did not worry the new couple at all. Throughout their lives they were agnostic and deists.
Ginny was ahead of her time in the recycle/healthy eating culture. In the 1970’s she often embarrassed her two children by bringing reusable cloth bags to the grocery store. Weekly she made yogurt, bread and granola from scratch. She was famous for her tight control on what the family ate. No snacking and no junk food. A healthy lifestyle was paramount to her, and she kept herself fit throughout her life, including an hour of daily exercises first thing every morning. She was still an active member of the Wednesday Irregulars, a Los Alamos hiking group, well into her eighties. As hiking became more difficult for her, she enjoyed attending their Christmas parties.
Ginny and George had a zest for adventure and traveled extensively. They were often on the forefront of adventure travel. They were equally comfortable in the great cities of the world to trekking in Bhutan in the 90’s. The family years fell into a predictable routine with winters spent skiing, spring breaks backpacking through the canyon country of Utah and early summer river trips rowing their own large rafts with other families. Most summers the family would head to the Canadian Rockies where the men would climb mountains and the women and children would hike and explore the area near base camp. The family was outfitted with Nordic skis in the early 70’s and spent vacations skiing in Yellowstone and in northern New Mexico where they built a cabin on their land near Chama, NM. In later years, the winter holidays were spent on the beaches of Mexico, Hawaii or the Caribbean with the extended family gathering for a week or two of warm adventuring.
Ginny’s husband, George, died in 2000, leaving her bereft and adrift. But she courageously built a life for herself around her lifelong passions – exercise, fanatically following tennis and football, avidly reading books and newspapers, listening to audiobooks, making good food, writing in her journals, connecting with friends, caring for her lush solarium plants and maintaining her large, memory-filled home. She continued to travel, often with her WWII pen pal, Rosemary, who lived in Australia. Rosemary and Ginny couldn’t have been more different, but they came together in widowhood to support each other and travel together extensively. Going through airport security they checked to ensure that they had the three P’s – passport, pack and purse!
Ginny was fiercely independent and was determined to live in her beloved Los Alamos home until her dying day. This became difficult as Ginny’s macular degeneration progressed to near-blindness and she became increasingly frail. Barbara Lemmick and husband Paul Zalis, neighbors and good friends, signed on to help Ginny remain at home and maintain a version of her well-loved routine the last three years of her life, providing daily help, delicious food, love and companionship. Their dog, Max, accompanied her daily walks and visited frequently, helping to satisfy Ginny’s great love of dogs. Friends, Eve Kloepper and Richard Montoya, were weekly visitors and David Torney provided good talks as well as firewood for her wood burning stove. Beth and Tom Fairbanks ensured that Ginny never missed a Los Alamos Concert performance. In her final year, Ginny would hold court on her front patio where the neighborhood children loved to visit with her. Eventually, Ginny had to be moved to The Retreat Healthcare in Rio Rancho, NM where she lived out the final few months of her life.
Ginny is preceded in death by her parents, Etha and Paul Lotz, sisters Madelyn McKean and Katherine Baxter, sister-in-law Barbara Bell, and her beloved husband, George Bell.
She is survived by her daughter, Carolyn Bell of Santa Fe, NM, and son and wife, George Bell and Esther Brady of Boulder, CO. Her grandchildren, Kaitlin, Austin and Derek Prince and Allison and Henry Bell will all miss their feisty grandmother.
A celebration of her life will be announced later, post pandemic, when we can all gather safely. Those who wish, may donate in her name to Pajarito Environmental Education Center (PEEC), 2600 Canyon Road, Los Alamos, NM 87544 or The National Parks Foundation at https://www.nationalparks.org.