Class News
Dennis Upper ’64 remembered by his wife Nancy in local magazine
February 23, 2021
Nancy Upper, a regular at the Boston classmate Zooms (and luncheons, remember them?) is the surviving spouse of our classmate Dennis Upper. Recently, Nancy was featured in a two-page spread in the February 2021 issue of “Life in the Flats,” a Winchester MA lifestyle magazine. She talks poignantly about her life with Dennis before he died in an accident. Nancy is writing a book about her fascination with the ampersand.
Nancy Upper Making Her Mark on the World
by Winchester MA resident David Shiang
Life in the Flats
February 2021
Nancy Upper is the founder and creative director of Uppersand™, an enterprise devoted to the history, typography, and worldwide uses of the ampersand. She, her late husband Dennis, and their son Jason were longtime Winchester residents.
Jason moved to Aspen, Colorado in 1999 but kept family ties and friendships strong with frequent communications and visits. After Dennis's untimely death in September 2018 from a fall, Nancy sold the Winchester house they had bought in 1982. Jason came to his mom's side to help her make the wrenching move to an out-of-town apartment. As soon as Nancy finds the right place, she will move back to the Winchester she loves so much.
Nancy grew up in Cincinnati, OH without a television. Her family could have afforded one, but her architect-artist-cartoonist father's motto was: "Do things for yourself. Don't watch other people doing things." Her mother agreed. Nancy has put her own twist on life ever since.
As children, she and her older sister invented their own games, their own language, and their own stories. Their parents let them explore the woodsy neighborhood alone but taught the girls vigilance. The freedom their parents gave them and their trust in the girls' common sense enriched the children's inventive minds.
Their parents encouraged physical activity as much as creative thinking. Nancy and her sister swam, ran, walked, hiked, bicycled, played sports, climbed trees, waterskied, ice-skated, rode sleds, built snowmen, went fishing, and danced. Nancy took to ballet with a passion, and she danced professionally for nine years. To this day, she makes exercise an essential part of her daily routine.
Physically fit and mentally resourceful, Nancy and her sister grew into self-reliant women, confident that they could achieve what they set their sights on achieving.
Decades later, at Brown University, Nancy saw a secretary make an eccentric ampersand. The character showed her a way to stand out. In 1988, Nancy's letter to the regional manager won her a job in the New England office of Adobe Systems Inc. The graphic design in Adobe Illustrator manuals and the ampersands on Adobe Type products spoke to her creative passions. When the company discontinued the job, Nancy returned to her first love, ballet, but the ampersands stayed vivid in her memory.
The next decades took Nancy from volunteering for Boston Ballet to writing the book Ballet Dancers in Career Transition: Sixteen Success Stories (McFarland, 2004) to a communications job at MIT. She assisted with PEN New England events, organized the Phi Beta Kappa Boston lecture series, did freelance writing, and helped to start the Boston Athenaeum Ambassador program.
In 2010, an art project returned her to ampersands. Suddenly, life came together. In the ampersand's posture, vitality, allure, creativity, and meaning were the dance, energy, spirit, ingenuity, and harmony that had shaped her life.
Nancy's husband Dennis was a highly accomplished psychologist. His brilliant career as a clinician, program director, and operations executive spanned fifty years. He excelled at the full range of psychological services, including individual treatment, group therapy, couples therapy, outpatient clinics, substance-abuse treatment programs, PTSD programs, program development, and behavioral medicine.
Born and raised in Cleveland, OH, he worked as a deckhand and professional musician while attending high school and college. After graduating valedictorian of his high-school class, he earned his bachelor's in English from Yale University, his master's in clinical psychology from the University of Cincinnati, his doctorate in clinical psychology from Case Western Reserve University, and the prestigious Diplomate in Clinical Psychology from the American Board of Professional Psychology.
In addition to his clinical, management, and executive successes, Dennis held adjunct teaching and supervisory positions at Harvard and Northeastern Universities and the Harvard Medical School.
Dennis was an equally brilliant author and poet. He edited twelve professional books, wrote more than thirty professional articles, and had his poems and short stories published in more than fifty literary journals. His 2007 memoir Long Story Short — a collection of one hundred vivid, thoughtful, funny, sad, and profound stories from his life — continues to captivate readers.
Dennis was a very funny man who could be the life of the party. One of his claims to fame is the publication of an article titled "The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of Writer's Block." It was published in the Journal of' Applied Behavior Analysis and has its own Wikipedia entry.
Today, Nancy gives presentations about the ampersand and is working on the manuscript of her book about the glyph, title to be decided. Her book establishes many firsts:
- First to tell the full story of how the ampersand rose from ancient sign to global necessity.
- First to show worldwide uses of the ampersand symbol, word, and meanings.
- First to reveal how ampersands fulfill our deepest needs.
- First to unite and interpret in one volume international ampersand knowledge, designs, news, lore, and voices.
To read more about Nancy's book, visit her website. If you would like to know more about Nancy's activities, or if you know of a good place in Winchester that is available, please contact her by email.