Sandra "Sandy" Lee Nazzaro

Sandy — wife, mother, daughter, partner, friend and balancer of check books.

Sandy, loving mother of Joseph and wife of Joe Nazzaro for 56 years, passed last night after a decade-long closing chapter with Alzheimer's.

She and Joe met at a skating rink in Redwood City, California. Sandy worked in San Francisco as a keypunch operator for the Passport branch of the State Department. Joe had just returned from Vietnam in the fall of 1968. They were married a year later — Joe says he was trying to get back into college on the GI Bill and needed a roommate with a steady job.

Sandy stayed by his side through his college years, then retired from her government job with the birth of Joseph to raise him while Joe rejoined his father's business in the San Francisco Bay Area, working alongside his brother John.

They moved to Texas in 1983 to expand the family business. Sandy took up volunteer work with PTA groups and Scouts and traveled with Joseph from ski trips in the California mountains to ski trips in the lakes of Texas, all while helping Joe grow the new company.

She later joined the company as administrator behind the insurances, the payrolls, the inventory, the books — the baseline of common sense while her husband took his chances. She was instrumental in every good outcome that business ever had.

Sandy was a seamstress, sewing the skating outfits she wore when she met Joe. Also skilled with yarn — when she wasn't knitting blankets in her early years with Joe, she was making clothes or costumes for her young son. She traveled to trade shows and conventions, representing the character and integrity of their family in the booths and at every gathering. Those who spent time with her knew her as upbeat, a little naive maybe, generous, and happy.

Later, as the business began to give back more than they put in, Joe and Sandy started their on-again, off-again, twenty-year commute — 1,200 miles round trip — to Trinidad, Colorado, where they took on one fixer-upper project a year. She would demo the walls. Joe would put them back together. That pursuit became the glue that held their marriage and partnership together for the rest of her years.

Truthfully, for Sandy, the attraction to Trinidad was its beautiful, well-stocked lake — fishing was her real passion. She knew it wouldn't take her long at all to tear apart whatever Joe needed fixed, and that putting it back together would always take him longer than tearing it up. So while Joe lost himself in rental repairs, Sandy went fishing. Her father had taken her salmon fishing outside the Golden Gate Bridge when she was young, and it was there she first learned to love solitude. In her last years she fished often and never waited long for a catch. Sandy was a natural.

She'd come back from the water, pole in one hand, her catch in the other, looking proud under her bucket hat wearing a t-shirt that read: "Here Fishy-Fishy." —that image, more than any other, expresses her desire for simple joys and is the dearest of them all.

In 1972, living in San Francisco — Sandy working, Joe finishing his degree — he wrote her this:

SANDY
Every day there's more to love about you
But somehow fewer words to say so.
I think that's what it always comes to —
The words can't say what the years will show.

Late at night I've watched you sleep
and studied your face in the quiet hours —
A vision I'll always keep
With the life, the hope and the love that's ours.

Sometimes I've said out loud, The Words
While you slept in that peaceful half-glow
but there's nothing left you haven't heard
The words can't say what the years will show.

In fifty-six years, words alone can't say what all those years have shown.

Memorial services will be held at Lucas Funeral Home in Hurst, TX on October 10th at 10 a.m.