Nancy Anne Douglass

Nancy Anne (Moore) Douglass, 99, passed away peacefully at St. Luke’s Hospice House from complications due to a fall at her home in Westwood, where she resided for over 65 years. Preceding her in death were her husband, Lee Carl Douglass (1980); her mother, Belle Eugenia Smith (1967); and her father, Hunt C. Moore (1969). She graduated from E.C. White Elementary School, Westport Junior High School and Southwest High School. She attended and graduated from Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York in approximately 1944.

She was an accomplished musician and taught music in the KCMO Public School System for several years. Playing the oboe, she performed in the Kansas City Philharmonic for many years as well as the Kansas City Sympathy, and she performed at Starlight Theatre for 20+ seasons.

She was a member of the Westport Chapter of the DAR for 74 years, and her vaunted skills as researcher and archivist for the DAR were always in demand. But to really know Nancy, one has to go back to her early childhood and her upbringing. She regaled those lucky enough to listen to this wonderful storyteller, with stories of being the only girl on her block of E. Concord in Kansas City, where she learned to throw mudballs with the worst of the boys, she became the kid who stayed on her sled the longest before colliding with the stone wall at the bottom of the steep hill that was her “territory “; and she was the chief instigator of the annual Halloween hijinks perpetrated by the kids on the block, and, to hear Nancy tell it, they never got caught.

Her father, Hunt C. Moore, a prominent attorney in Kansas City, past President of the Board of Education of Kansas City and former Jackson County Prosecutor, taught Nancy to hunt, fish and ride horseback at an early age. She became quite accomplished at all three. She was very proud, and loved to tell stories, of being allowed to accompany her father and several of his judge friends, on their duck hunting, or pheasant hunting, or rabbit and squirrel hunting adventures. “You don’t know what pressure is until you are the only female in the hunting party and it is your turn to shoot and they are all watching how you do.” Nancy never disappointed and always made her dad proud. Later in life she loved to go the Pecos Canyon, New Mexico, where she fished, hiked and camped. She was a rough and ready gal. She rode Indian ponies bareback with her cousins in her beloved Tennessee, where her father and his ancestors were from, and where she still has relatives from the large Moore family.

She is survived by her second cousin, John Barclay Moore and wife, Patsy, Winchester, TN; cousin, Michael Hill, M.D., Nashville, TN; and niece, Suze Merritt, Kansas City, MO. Services will be at noon on January 5, 2022 at the chapel in Forest Hill Cemetery, 6901 Troost, KCMO.