Obituary for Nathalie Elizabeth Georgia Sato ’45
Reed Magazine, June 2015, Reed College, Portland, OR
"Nathalie Elizabeth Georgia Sato ’45, September 2, 2014, in the Highlands, North Carolina. Nathalie was born in Ithaca, New York, where her parents, Frederick R. Georgia and Lolita Healey Georgia, lived while teaching at Cornell University. Her father was one of the founders of Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1933, and Nathalie resided in the Highlands in 1931–32 when her father bought the Flat Mountain one-room schoolhouse and converted it into the family’s summer home. She earned a BA in political science from Reed, writing the thesis “The Political Activities of Wendell Willkie” with Prof. Charles McKinley [political science 1918–60]. “The intellectual environment of Reed may have been overpowering,” she wrote later, “but my social and political beliefs had their beginnings at Reed.” Nathalie went on to study political science and city planning, and received an MA from Cornell and a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She worked as a planner in state and local government, beginning her career as the chief urban planner for Chicago area transportation studies, and, at the time of her retirement in 1983, she was a planning analyst for the Pennsylvania state planning and development office in Harrisburg. In retirement, she returned to the family’s summer home in the Highlands. “When not walking the dogs in the woods, I do get out for new and old hobbies, and for volunteer work.” Nathalie hiked, gardened, and also did weaving on the loom that her father had built at Black Mountain. She served as docent at the Highlands Historical Museum and helped catalog the archives of the Highlands Historical Society. She was preceded in death by her son, who died in an accident in 2006, and her brother."