Claudia Post Hannah (1929-2017)

Claudia Post Hannah was born on May 5th, 1929 in Baltimore, Maryland to Emily Dohme Post and Charles Gordon Post. She was the eldest of their four daughters, all named for Shakespearian characters.

She grew up in Poughkeepsie, NY, where her father was Professor of Political Science at Vassar College, and attended nearby Arlington High School, graduating in 1947. During her teenage and college years, Claudia worked summers as a counselor at Alford Lake Camp in Maine, where her love for sports and for play made her popular with the campers.

After graduating from Vassar in 1951, Claudia began a lifetime of enthusiastic engagement with different cultures, first spending nine months in Mexico in development work with the American Friends Service Committee. There she learned Spanish, a language she loved and would continue to use throughout her life.

In 1957, Claudia found her dream job working for the American Field Service in New York City. For the next five years, she traveled around the world interviewing and chaperoning foreign high school students who had been selected to spend a year living in the United States. This work took her to Norway, Turkey, Japan, Greece, the Philippines, Germany, France and the UK.

Claudia met her future husband John Lionel Hannah (b. Anthony Bennett) in New York City, and the two would marry in January of 1962. They had two sons, Matthew Gordon Hannah and John Bennett Hannah.

The Hannahs moved to the Washington DC area in 1966, where John Lionel had found work as a computer programmer. In October of 1967 they would settle down on Grace Church Rd. in Silver Spring. The boys grew up there, and the modest house in North Woodside would remain Claudia's home until 2011. Neighbors and friends of her children remember her as a friendly, generous and welcoming person, always ready to invite people in and always happy to hear the sound of children at play.

After setting her career aside for the first few years of parenting, Claudia became a real estate agent in 1971, working briefly for J.F. Begg in Bethesda, Maryland, and then moving to the Wheaton Office of Shannon and Luchs (later Weichert) in 1972. There she became a successful agent known throughout Montgomery County. She would remain at the Wheaton office until her retirement in the early 2000s.

Claudia was cherished both by her colleagues and by her clients for her honesty, friendliness and genuine interest in people of all sorts. She loved working with the international and multicultural population that has made the DC area one of the most diverse urban areas in the United States. She delighted in learning bits and pieces of lives and languages from all over the world through work with her clients.

In 2011 Claudia sold her house in Silver Spring and moved to Sunrise Senior Living in Severna Park, MD, to be close to her partner and friend Bob Westerdale. She and Bob enjoyed an active and loving relationship, traveling and attending shows regularly. But the loss of her younger son John Bennett to a sudden heart attack in 2016 cast a shadow over her final year of life.

In the Spring of 2017, Claudia fell and broke her hip. After a long and ultimately unsuccessful rehabilitation period following a hip operation, she moved back into Sunrise under hospice care. Claudia died peacefully there on July 26th, 2017 in the presence of her son Matthew.

Everyone who knew Claudia remembers her as an exceptionally kind, positive and welcoming person who always assumed the best about people she met. She was a loving mother and a deeply loyal friend. Her entire adult life was a living testament to her unshakeable belief that a world full of all different kinds of people is a good and an interesting world worth getting to know.

Claudia P. Hannah will be sorely missed and fondly remembered by all whose lives she touched. Small private memorial events will be held in Poughkeepsie, NY and Silver Spring, MD in early September.