Nancy Salvador Newton, 78, passed away Feb. 5 at her home in Burns.

Nancy was born April 18, 1940, at Portland’s Good Samaritan Hospital to Leonard Salvadore and Thelma White.

She was a precocious child and could read the newspaper comics by age 3.  As an adult, she breezed through a Mensa Admittance Test. Nancy attended high school at Lincoln in Portland and then Oregon City. Following high school, she went right to work and spent several years at United Grocers in Milwaukie before moving to Gold Beach where she served as a dispatcher and matron for the Curry County Sheriff’s Office. Since that job required working nights, she resigned and went to work for Pioneer Title Insurance in Gold Beach before being transferred to Salem and then to Woodburn.

In 1979, she was elected president of the Mid-Willamette Valley Escrow Council. After a sharp decline in the real estate market, she taught courses at the Norm Webb Real Estate School in Salem.

While in Woodburn, she met Dewey Newton, a Woodburn attorney and justice of the peace. They were married in 1981. A year later, Nancy suffered a career-ending ventricular fibrillation event, which caused her to spend the next four months in the Salem hospital, about two-and-a-half months of which were spent at the Three Morse Rehab Facility. Nancy then entered part two of her life as a handicapped person. Due to the anoxic brain damage that she suffered, her entire world became dyslexic. She could no longer drive a car, tell time on an analog clock, or make sandwiches (to cite a few examples). But she could still answer the questions (answers?) on Jeopardy, and if you gave her the crossword clue, she could usually come up with the answer. She just couldn’t write it down.

Her last years were spent in relative happiness aided by comforting words from an ever-declining group of friends who could still remember Super Nancy. In November 2015, the doctors at St. Charles sent her to hospice with three days to live.

Nancy is survived by her husband, Dewey Newton; son, Todd Wilhelm of Spokane, Wash.; three stepsons, Glenn, Dane, and Mark; one stepdaughter, Rosalind Reed; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

A funeral service was held Friday, Feb. 15, at LaFollette’s Chapel in Burns.