Charlotte Sanford ("Toddy") Mason

Charlotte ("Toddy") died on April 11th after a lengthy illness of stomach cancer, wonderfully cared for at Dana Farber and by Care Dimensions. She was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1944. Her father was an academic, and so she was raised in a series of college towns: Providence, Rhode Island; Belmont, Massachusetts; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Middlebury, Vermont; Amherst, Massachusetts; and Troy, New York. Always an internationalist, Charlotte spent her senior year in high school in Strasbourg, France, living with a family responsible for constructing the European Union and serving Charles De Gaulle in Africa; that year she attended the Université de France à Strasbourg. Charlotte graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in History in the social sciences. There she met her husband Philip A. Mason, who was in law school. The Masons lived and raised their family in Brookline, except for a two-year stint in Washington, where Philip worked for Father Drinan in the House of Representatives and Charlotte obtained a Master's Degree at Georgetown University. In Brookline, Charlotte was involved in local school and town service. She was a loving grandparent, enthusiastic hostess, avid reader (three book groups!), traveler (primarily in Asia), skier, sailor, gardener, and longtime member of the Boston Committee on Foreign Relations. Charlotte taught histories at Newton North High School, and ran an exchange program between The Newton Public Schools and an elite school in the heart of Beijing, for which she studied Chinese language. Out of this exchange program later grew an organization, The China Exchange Initiative, funded by the Freeman Foundation, that exchanged school leaders between US states and Chinese provinces: school superintendents would spend two weeks in one another's countries learning about one another's education system and shadowing one another in their schools. She finished her career at Boston University as a Visiting Researcher, studying schools in China at the pre-college level. Charlotte is survived by her beloved family: husband Philip; son, Nathaniel (Ashley Houston); daughter, Claire; daughter, Nicole (Elliott Friedman); and four grandchildren, Indya, Natty, Ellis, and Porter Mason. A Memorial will be held at 11:00 A.M. on Saturday, April 15, at First Parish in Brookline, 382 Walnut Street. In lieu of flowers, please send a donation to The Newton Schools Foundation, c/o The Newton Beijing JIngshan School Exchange Program, 100 Walnut Street, Newtonville, Massachusetts 02460.