LEBANON, NH — Phyllis R. Schultz, born on March 9, 1938 in a farmhouse near Cando, North Dakota died in Lebanon, New Hampshire on September 8, 2020 Phyllis’s parents, Percy Judd and Rea Davis Judd, had met as students at North Dakota State University in the early 1920s; Phyllis was the youngest of their three children. From an early age, she participated in the work of the farm, founded by her grandfather, Elmer Judd, in the 1890s. As she grew older she became a close working companion to her father.
Encouraged by her mother, Phyllis’s strong commitment to music—piano and voice—began early; a musical high point was her solo piano recital—all classics, all memorized– when she graduated from Jamestown College as a nursing major In 1960. She began her career in that same year at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. In the fall of that year she met her husband-to-be, Robert “Bob” Schultz. In the spring of 1961 she took a job in the Cancer Clinical Center at NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, to be near Bob, then completing his active naval duty in Washington, D.C. They married in June, and moved their first home, an eight-by-fifty-foot house trailer, to Atlanta, where Bob began graduate studies in philosophy and Phyllis practiced nursing. She loved to tease Bob that he married her so she could work as a nurse to “put hubby through.”
During their Atlanta years, Phyllis began her own graduate studies in nursing. The couple’s first son, Robert Judd (“Rob”) was born in 1962 and their younger son, Sander Richard, was born in 1966 when Bob was teaching at Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. In 1971 the family moved to Denver, where Phyllis’s interest in nursing research was sparked; she soon completed a research project showing that pairing nurse practitioners with physicians could provide more effective and more affordable healthcare to seniors.
In 1981 Phyllis completed doctoral studies in the sociology of complex organizations. During the 1980s, on the nursing faculty of the University of Colorado, and later, during the 1990s at the University of Washington in Seattle, Phyllis taught doctoral students and continued developing her career as a teacher and researcher. She focused her work on community health nursing, rural healthcare delivery, and nursing administration. During 1987-88 she was President of the national Association of Community Health Nurse Educators. During a post-doctoral year at the University of California at San Francisco, she secured a wise and caring mentor and friend, Dr. Afaf Meleis, later the Dean of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania.
During her years at the University of Washington, she accelerated her research and writing productivity. She became the first nursing professor at the University of Washington to be appointed a Fulbright Scholar. That scholarship enabled her to teach nursing on the island of Cyprus, in both the Greek-speaking and Turkish communities there. She also did research on Cyprus that became part of a year spent with Bob in locations around the globe, studying how differing community values affect health. In 1992 she was inducted as a Fellow into the American Academy of Nursing.
She retired in 2000 to Port Townsend, Washington on the Olympic Peninsula, where she engaged with enthusiasm in supporting the town library, serving as secretary of the county Democrats, and helping to preserve wildlife habitat. In 2013, Phyllis and Bob moved to Lebanon, New Hampshire, to be closer to the families of their sons Rob (Hanover, NH) and Sander (Gloucester, MA). Phyllis is survived by her immediate family, Bob, Rob, and Sander; by daughters-in-law Alex Keats, Sara Schultz, and Diane Reinhardt; and by grandchildren Eleanor Keats, Bergren Keats, Hunter Schultz, Tayler Schultz, Meryl Friets, and Sophie Friets.
The legacies of her family life and of her professional career will carry Phyllis’s memory long into the future. A memorial gathering will be planned at a later time. Contributions honoring Phyllis’s memory may be made to the Jefferson Land Trust, 1033 Lawrence Street, Port Townsend, Washington, 98368.