Rash's Surname Index
Notes for Grace Felt RUSSELL
Grace Russell Wheeler, 80, of Bryn Mawr, a market researcher, conservationist and community activist, died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease March 26 at home.
Mrs. Wheeler grew up in Edgewater Park. Her father, Norman Russell, believed women should be independent and sent her and her sister, Ella, to Bennington College, a progessive Vermont school that at the time educated only women.
While earning a bachelor's degree in political economy, Mrs. Wheeler learned to pluck chickens and harvest crops. Her professors included poet W.H. Auden, dancer Martha Graham, and Peter F. Drucker, a management expert who later called her the best student he ever had.
After graduating, Mrs. Wheeler worked for the New Jersey Planning Commission and then for Alderson & Sessions, a market-research firm in Philadelphia.
In 1954 she married Philip P. Sharples. They had three children together, and he had a son from a previous marriage. The couple moved to a home he had built in 1948 in Bryn Mawr.
While raising a family, Mrs. Wheeler helped establish the Gladwyne Montessori School and earned a master's degree in business administration from Temple University.
When she and Sharples divorced in 1976, she kept the Bryn Mawr property and established a market-research firm. Her clients included the U.S. Information Service, the Franklin Institute, and the World Affairs Council. She retired in the late 1980s.
In 1980, she married Alexander B. Wheeler. They enjoyed summers at his cottage in Somesville, Maine. He died in 1991.
Mrs. Wheeler was active with the Bennington College Alumnae Association and served on the boards of Family Support Service in Upper Darby and Arcadia University.
She was chairwoman of the board of William Penn Charter School in Philadelphia when the private Quaker boys' school decided to become coeducational in 1980. Fellow board member Lew Somers said the decision, which took two years to reach, had been "persistently but gently done." Mrs. Wheeler, he said, "won the blessing of many devoted alumni over time."
Another board member, John White, said Mrs. Wheeler had been involved in every significant change at the school. A scholarship in her honor was established there in 1986.
For many years, Mrs. Wheeler was membership chairwoman of the Darby Creek Valley Association. She was involved in the restoration of the banks of the creek, which ran through her property, and wrote a history of Darby Creek from the time of the Lenape.
Though in failing health in recent years, she initiated the process to create a Natural Lands Trust conservation easement for 37 of her acres in Bryn Mawr. "The easement will ensure that the land will remain as open space in perpetuity, providing habitat for wildlife, protecting the water quality of Darby Creek, and protecting the pastoral landscape," said Stephen Kuter, director of the Conservation Easement Program.
Mrs. Wheeler was devoted to caring for her property, Kuter said. She would be outside early in the morning, weeding out nonnative growth and controlling the grape ivy, her daughter Grace Cooke said. The letter confirming the conservation easement arrived the day she died, her daughter said.
In addition to her daughter and sister, Mrs. Wheeler is survived by a son, Russell Sharples; another daughter, Martha Sharples; stepchildren Philip Sharples and Alexander and Warwick Wheeler; 11 grandchildren; and her former husband.
A memorial service will be held at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday at Haverford Friends Meeting, 851 Buck Lane, Haverford.
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