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ANGELL ELSA ANGELL Elsa Angell (nee Rosenberger) was born on March 9, 1939 in McKees Rocks Pennsylvania, a small town just a few miles west of Pittsburgh. Her mother Margaret was soon to become a widow for the second time being left with four daughters to raise. Her first husband died in a steel mill accident and the second, Elsa's father, of esophageal cancer when she was five years old. Elsa was a precocious child who learned to read by herself when one of her sisters told her that the letters in the alphabet said their own names. She was just three years old. That happy accident turned her into a lifelong reader and eventually fierce advocate for literacy. She graduated from the University of Pittsburgh and began teaching English in high school. Her dream was to go to Europe and visit the home countries that her two parents immigrated from, Germany and present-day Slovakia. When her college friends who were to go with her all got married and opted out she quit her job, gathered her meager savings and went alone. She eventually made her way to Germany and got a job at the Agfa camera factory in Munich. Eager to learn the language she enrolled in a German language school where classes were given at night for foreign workers. There, she met her husband-to-be of 54 years, Tom Angell. They were married on July 9, 1967 and moved to Chicago where Tom was working. Tom's new job brought them to Washington DC in 1968 and Elsa eventually started work as an editor of books and journal articles for the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD). Soon she also was working at the Fairfax County jail helping the inmates earn their GED's and volunteering at the Literacy Council of Northern Virginia (LCNV), an organization primarily devoted to teaching English as a second language to the county's swelling immigrant population. She became president of the LCNV in 1984 and in 1986 was appointed to the Virginia Literacy Foundation where she served until 2015. Throughout this time she continued her educational pursuits receiving her Masters degree in education from the University of Virginia and attending Comanius University in Slovakia to add to her skills in Slovac. Conversant in German, she traveled there regularly to visit friends and accompanied her husband to Montepulciano Italy where they attended Italian language school every spring for some years. Elsa loved to travel and over the years visited countless countries to experience and learn from their varied cultures. Those travels took her from Greenland to the Antarctic, New Zealand to Mongolia, Uzbekistan to Cuba - everywhere spreading her joy in a life well lived, full of purpose and meaning. She died on May 23, 2022 of complications from a hip fracture at Arlington Hospital. She was 83. There was no service.
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