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Birth:          18 Aug 1935 
Death:          12 Jan 2004 Brooksville, Hancock Co., Me.
Cause of Death: breast cancer

Notes
!PUBL
awt disney tree
1940 in Phoenixville, Montgomery Co., Pa.

Gail: RR1 Box 24, Brooksville, Maine 04617 b 18 Aug 1935
also at that address: husband and daughters
WHO ARE Shawn (303 Coastal Rd, Brooksville), and M Sue Disney, 303 Coastal Rd

http://www.swarthmore.edu/x26871.xml
Good Life Center to host discussion on simplicity, frugality
By Staff
HARBORSIDE (Aug 18): The Good Life Center at Forest Farm, the homestead of 
back-to-the-landers Helen and Scott Nearing, continues the tradition of Monday night 
meetings at the Reversing Falls Sanctuary in West Brooksville.

The panel will include Beedy Parker, Joan Cheetham and Emilie Hermans. They will 
offer personal experiences, insights, and suggestions based on the Nearing precepts 
of "live simply that others may live" (Helen) and "pay as you go" (Scott).
...
Hermans is a second generation back-to-the-lander and lives with her husband and 
their 2-year-old daughter in a timber-frame home they built on 60 acres in Surry. As a 
daughter of Tom Hoey and Gail Disney of South Brooksville, she hauled her daily 
share of wood and water. After graduating from George Stevens Academy and 
Swarthmore College, she lived and worked in Seattle before moving back to Maine's 
Penobscot peninsula. She met her husband, Joe, while apprenticing at the King Farm 
in Penobscot.

facebook msg 21 Jun 2011 from Dierdre Brownback
Maine Marr Idx on familysearch
ss death idx
http://ellsworthamerican.com/archive/2004/03-11-04/ea_obit3_03-11-04.html
BROOKSVILLE

Her family and her communities lost Gail Disney, 68, to breast cancer Jan. 12, 2004. 
She was mother and matriarch, a woman who carried herself by design and with class, 
who fulfilled deeply her sense of responsibility to community and the environment, and 
who did it all throughout and to the end with directness and authenticity.

Motherhood and family were an essential part of Gail’s identity. Her dedication to her 
daughters, Gwyneth, Megan, Emilie and Deirdre, was without parallel; her success in 
this role led her women friends at one point to bestow upon her the Golden Womb 
award. And she was a marvelous caretaker for her aging parents, rushing home to 
prepare meals for them no matter whatever else was going on her life. She was the 
Earth Mother to her community, their Alternative Domestic Goddess. She would dress 
up for the grand occasions — not to impress, but as if in a role as Celtic Queen to keep 
her tribe together by ushering in the Spring.

Gail was an athlete, an avid tennis player, lettering in field hockey in high school, a 
proficient fencer at Bryn Mawr who terrified men at Haverford who might have to spar 
with her. While a great competitor, it was the thrill of movement that engaged her 
most. At May Day celebrations each year, she would lead the dance, coaching and 
encouraging newcomers and the young girls, assuring the perfection we all enjoyed in 
recent years as the cloth strips she dyed and fashioned were woven precisely around 
the pole as the girls and women danced the two intertwining circles. Her care for body 
included generous cooking. If you heard the egg beater at potluck, you knew Gail had 
made her famous ginger bread and was whipping plenty of cream.

Part of Gail’s pleasure in weaving was certainly the music and the poetry of the 
physical movement it entailed, but it went way beyond that. Rag rugs which she 
started weaving long before they were in fashion were her bread and butter, but her 
tessellating rugs, which she designed herself after the work of M.C. Escher, were 
dessert and wine (she’d often say they made her head spin) rolled into one. The 
complex animals of wool and linen seemed to dance on the surfaces she wove. On a 
recent trip to Ireland with her spinning friends, Gail’s inspirations became clear — 
sheep, tiny knitting needles, fine linen weaving and long traditions. At Maeve’s Mound 
overlooking Sligo and Donegal  Bay, they marveled at the mist and the soft colors, 
and planned their next rugs. 

Gail was an activist, from neighborhood to nation. With her first husband, David 
Thomas, she moved with Gwyneth, her firstborn, to New Zealand, to escape the 
strontium 90 fallout from nuclear testing in the Northern Hemisphere. Weaving her rugs 
was a Gandhi-like political statement of simplicity, recycling and renewal. Her 
association with Quakers begun in childhood provided her with community to support 
her resistance to war, environmental degradation, and social injustice. Gail organized 
to protest successfully the A.E.S. trash-burning plant. She tried to keep the Blue Hill 
Co-op from selling health junk food. In 1975, with her second husband, Tom Hoey, she 
moved to Maine with her two children, Gwyneth and Megan, to homestead in the small 
town of Brooksville. There, Emilie and Deirdre were born. For the next 10 years there 
was no running water, but a large garden, orchard, goats, pigs and chickens. To live 
simply so that others could simply live was her reality.

Gail lived deliberately and without regrets. Her friends never saw her unkind, but 
neither did she mince her words. She loved to express her opinions on everything; 
honesty was one of her great strengths in personal relationships. Over her loom she 
could counsel the disconsolate. When someone offered the view that only pleasant 
things should be discussed during sauna or potluck meals, Gail protested. She had 
been raised to consider arguments at the dinner table a right and proper tradition she 
intended to continue. Gail was true to her authenticity — what you saw is what you got. 

Gail is survived by her husband, her four daughters, two grandchildren, and her 
spinning, crone, sauna, family, geographical and activist communities

Parents
DISNEY Gerald Corliss (3 May 1908 - 15 Sep 1998)
PRENTZEL Mary ("Sue") (13 Dec 1910 - )

Siblings
DISNEY Shawn E. ()
DISNEY Gail (18 Aug 1935 - 12 Jan 2004)
DISNEY Joan D. ()

Marriage To THOMAS David ()
    m.  

Notes


Children by THOMAS David 
THOMAS Gwyneth (13 Mar 1962 - 15 Aug 2019)
THOMAS Megan ()

Marriage To HOEY Thomas Edwin ()

Notes


Children by HOEY Thomas Edwin
DISNEY-HOEY Emilie ()
DISNEY-HOEY Deirdre ()

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