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Laconia, NH – Jane Bennett Willingham Smith died November 26, 2025 at the age of 95 at the Taylor Community in Laconia, New Hampshire.

Jane will be remembered for her quick wit, warmth, and lifelong search for meaning. The mother of five children, she quietly took on roles uncommon for women of her era – fixing computers and appliances, changing tires and oil, managing household finances, and returning to school in her mid-40s to earn a master’s degree in education. Over the course of 17 years teaching at New Hampton School, she rose to lead the English Department.

Jane was predeceased by many friends, her beloved parents Fred and Margaret Bennett, as well as two husbands, novelist and screenwriter Calder Willingham Jr. and diplomat Frederick Smith Jr. Her youngest son, Christopher Willingham, died in 2015. Fred’s daughter, Meredith Chase Smith, passed away in 2006.

Both marriages spanned decades – and were based on appreciation for intellectual stimulation, travel, music and philosophy. But her life’s longest relationship was with the town of New Hampton.

Over eight decades, she saw the elm trees that once lined Shingle Camp Hill fall to disease and become the stumps her children climbed and played upon. The interstate arrived and the first gas stations and restaurants reshaped – but never diminished – her connection with the town.

Born April 2, 1930, in Brooklyn, New York, Jane grew up in an apartment across from Prospect Park, where she learned early to love books, the rhythms of language and systems of thought. She attended Berkeley Institute in Park Slope, where she wrote a monthly column for the school newspaper under the pseudonym “Penwright Leaky.” After graduating in 1947, she went on to Wellesley College, earning a bachelor’s degree in English Literature in 1951. After college, she worked at Woman’s Day magazine reading short story manuscripts submitted by aspiring writers.

In 1953, a Woman’s Day coworker introduced her to Calder Willingham, a writer with a Georgia southern accent who was as moved as she was by Corinthians 13 and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. They were married September 15, 1953 – the same day Calder’s stage adaptation of his novel End as a Man opened at the Theatre de Lys in New York. Programs that night were handed out by Jane herself, still in her white wedding dress.

They lived in New York for a short time before moving to her family home in New Hampton, a place that would connect both her childhood and her adult and family life.