Saint Nancy and The Professor

John D. Stewart, Jr.: Professional Background. Aspiring author. 

Second author, William A. Gardner, referred to in the book title as The Professor, was the husband for nearly six decades of Nancy S. Gardner, whom he refers to as Saint Nancy. He bestowed this honorary title on his beloved wife when he sat down to write this biography because of the exemplary life she lived being so kind, giving, and loving to an extended group of people she referred to as her Family of Friends, totaling near 50 individuals. These were people she worked with in her many employment activities, mostly freelance, played with in her life long commitment to physical fitness and her devotion to many arts and crafts, and for whom she hosted so many social/culinary events at her and William's homes. Over the years this included the most modest imaginable dwellings, a comfortable summer beach cottage in Westport, CA, a condominium on the vineyards in Yountville, Ca, the heart of the Napa Wine Valley, and for the majority of their final 25 years, a jewel hidden in the Conifer Forest of the Mayacamas Mountain range between the Napa Valley and Sonoma Valley of the Moon.
This isolated ten acres contained  a 1930s vintage cross between a cabin and a a lodge, with two large river stone fireplaces and all knotty pine interior finish, multiple outbuildings that ultimately included a guest cottage, a huge 2nd story arts and crafts space that housed Nancy's production loom, and various decorative structures, including water storage tank, water treatment system, swimming pool equipment house, combination root and wine cellar, a small log cabin housing emergency power equipment, and a tent house on a plateau on an isolated knoll with extraordinary high-elevation views.

All structures shared the camp design elements of river stone, redwood shingles, forest green trim, and redwood shake or green roofs. The land scape was accented with river stone half walls.

William with much morale support and wonderful sustenance provided by Nancy created this retreat from the shambles of a long forgotten  homestead and named it Vista Norte.

This was Nancy's base for hosting her many events for her family of friends.

When William was not totally absorbed in
the development of Vista Norte, he was an academician committed to the creation and implementation of paradigm shifts in scientific data processing theory and method--to which he devoted more than half a century from receipt of his PhD degree in 1972, to completion of his final research paper and last book 2026, The Statistical and Probabilistic Theory of Functions.