This “Life Stories” profile is part of a collection of articles remembering Vermonters who died in 2025.
Linda “Jan” Danziger, an art teacher who taught in central Vermont for nearly half a century, had a gift for convincing people to try new activities — painting, music, theater, poetry — that they might have believed were beyond their natural abilities.
“She was never pushy or anything,” said Jane Youngbaer, a longtime friend and former colleague at Twinfield Union School in Plainfield, where Jan taught for 43 years. “With a smile on her face, she would say, ‘I think you would be good at this.’”
Jan was always smiling, drawing people into her orbit because she created beautiful and inviting spaces. Those included her home, which was known for its gorgeous interior design and festive holiday décor; her sumptuous gardens, which she meticulously mapped out in journals each year; and her art class at Twinfield, which, for many students, was more than a place to learn new art techniques and mediums. It was a haven for those who didn’t fit in elsewhere.
“School isn’t always wonderful for everybody, so my mom’s room was where the kids would go to hang out and find solace,” said Jan’s daughter, Kim. “They all loved her.”
Jan, who died of natural causes in July at age 82, was a joiner and a doer. For years she volunteered at Cutler Memorial Library in Plainfield, applying her artist’s eye to make it more attractive and useful to patrons. She served as longtime president of the Vermont chapter of Delta Kappa Gamma, an international honor society of women educators. And she helped found and was deeply involved in Destination Imagination, an international competition in which students solve challenges using science, technology, engineering, art and math.
Said Alex Shepard, Kim’s longtime life partner: “Jan was always zipping off to something.”
She was never known to gossip or speak a harsh word about anyone. Yet for all her love, support and encouragement of others, Jan was deeply private and wouldn’t share her own pain with those closest to her. This was especially true after her son, Matthew, died at 47.
“My mom’s room was where the kids would go to hang out and find solace.”
Kim Danziger
For Jan, “If you don’t talk about the issues, they do not exist,” said Sandy Wells, her best friend of 50 years. “You keep a smile on, and everything is golden.”
Jan was born Linda Lanser in 1943 at Fort Bragg, N.C., the oldest of three children. Her father, Roland Lanser, had been a U.S. infantryman in Germany during World War II and, upon his return, moved the family often. They finally settled in Littleton, Colo., where Jan’s mother, Vivian Lanser, worked as a special education teacher and Roland became a professor of education at the University of Denver. When Jan enrolled at the university, she majored in art education.
It was there, in 1960, during her first fall semester, that Jan met Jeff Danziger. He was an art major who would go on to become a nationally syndicated political cartoonist — and her husband.
“She was very sweet, very shy but also very determined,” Jeff recalled about his first impressions of Jan. He proposed to her “almost immediately” after their first date, though the couple waited until he graduated in 1965 to marry.
Within a year, the Danzigers decided to buy some land. Through a national real estate catalog, they found a defunct farm in Plainfield with a house, barn and orchard on 50 acres, plus gorgeous views of Camel’s Hump. The cost: $8,500.
In 1967 Jeff was drafted and spent four years in the U.S. Army, including nearly a year in Vietnam. Matthew, the couple’s first child, was born in 1969 while Jeff was still away. Upon his return, Jeff began teaching art at U-32 Middle & High School in Montpelier, while Jan taught in Barre and East Montpelier before getting hired at Twinfield in 1972. Two years later, the Danzigers adopted Kim, then an infant, from Cambodia.
Though Jan and her friend Wells both taught at Twinfield, they met through their husbands. As a political cartoonist, Jeff often worked with Wells’ first husband, the late Stephen Terry, who was then managing editor of the Rutland Herald. The couples occasionally had dinner together at the Danzigers’ home, which Wells said was “like something out of a museum.” During the winter holidays, decorations and candles in every room recalled a Hans Christian Andersen story.
The two women spent a lot of time together, initially through the Plainfield Little Theatre, which put on Gilbert and Sullivan plays each year. They also served on the library board — Wells as chair, Jan as treasurer — and volunteered in leadership roles with Delta Kappa Gamma. Through the latter, Jan created an arts retreat in Plainfield, introducing women to painting, mosaics, pottery and writing haiku. Several years ago, the now-annual retreat was renamed the Jan Danziger Arts Day in her honor. Said Wells, “She believed everybody has an artist inside them.”
When Jeff decided to move to New York City in 1980 to pursue a full-time career as a cartoonist, he and Jan divorced. “She was willing to let people do what they wanted to do,” he said. It was an amicable parting, and Jan remained close to Jeff and his family for the rest of her life.
“She was very sweet and diplomatic,” Kim said. “She didn’t like confrontation at all.”
“Jan would never admit that [she and Jeff] had split up and kept her wedding rings on,” added Wells, who only learned of the divorce through her ex-husband. “I was like, ‘You don’t need to keep this secret from me. I’ve already been through this!’” she told Jan. “But we still had each other, so life went on.”
Indeed, for years the two women often traveled together: to England for a theater trip, to China on a three-week trip for Vermont educators, and to Maine and the Adirondacks in the summer. They performed in a musical trio, with Jan on cello and Wells on flute. And they played cards, at which Jan was “ruthless,” Wells said.
After her divorce, Jan bought a run-down brick house in Plainfield village and restored it. The restoration was so stunning that when Wells remarried, in 1992, Jan hosted her reception.
“It was gorgeous … She pulled out all the stops,” Wells recalled. “That’s the kind of thing she was really good at.”
At Twinfield, Jan excelled as an educator. In 1986 she received the Outstanding Educators Award from the University of Vermont College of Education. Two years later, she invited students to make re-creations of famous artworks from around the world, then hung them throughout the building. The “Children’s Museum of Great Art,” as Jan dubbed it, made such an impression that then-governor Madeleine Kunin came to Twinfield to present her with an award while the Vermont Youth Orchestra played.
“It was a big, big deal,” Kim said.
Among the kids who contributed art to the children’s museum was Yung Oh Le Page, then a recent transfer student. Like Jan, Le Page had been a military brat whose family relocated often. He struggled in school and had a troubled relationship with his father and stepmother. When Le Page’s father kicked him out of the house, Jan invited the teenager to move into her house.
“I got to witness what real parenting was, just seeing how she supported Kim,” he said. “She was like another mom to me.”
Now 54, Le Page went on to become an artist and educator himself, getting his first art job at the Children’s Museum of the Arts in New York City. “I found my calling,” he said, “and Jan definitely had a big part in that.”
He wasn’t the only one. After Jan’s death, several former students posted memories of her on Facebook. Many described her as the best art teacher they’d ever had.
“Every time I pick up a pencil or paint brush, I hear Jan’s quiet encouragement,” wrote Stephanie Carter Caplan, of Belhaven, N.C.
Isaiah Quittner, now a Burlington artist, remembers how Jan not only paid for art supplies out of her own pocket but also provided him and others with a “safe space” to pursue their creativity. As he wrote, “She always left the light on for anyone who needed it, in this community and beyond.”
In 2015, Jan retired from teaching at 72. A year later, her happy-go-lucky persona was upended when her son, Matthew, whom the family thought had beaten throat cancer, experienced a sudden brain bleed and died soon after.
“I think she truly believed that if you’re good, then good things happen to you, and if you’re bad, then bad things happen to you,” Shepard said. Matthew’s death “shattered that notion of the world.”
Kim remembers her mom making a point of the fact that she never cried afterward.
“She never told me, but I could tell it was hard for her,” she said.
As Jan’s health deteriorated in the last few years, she reached a point at which Kim and Shepard no longer felt comfortable with her living alone in her Plainfield house. For a time she lived in a Shelburne retirement home — until COVID-19 hit, when Kim invited her to move into their house in Burlington’s New North End. There, she kept a modest art studio with her cello and landscape paintings.
Jan, who never drank, smoked or tried drugs, was very much of a “bygone era of white-picket fence America,” Shepard recalled.
“She was proud of the fact that she never even had coffee,” he added. “Her ‘wild night’ was a cup of caffeinated tea.”
Thus he and Kim chuckled at a memory from Jan’s final days in hospice, when she reluctantly agreed to a shot of morphine to ease her pain. Moments later, she looked around, perked up and said, “I feel quite good!”
“I bet you do!” Shepard recalled saying. “That’s a lot stronger than a cup of tea.”
When Jan died, “It was about as peaceful as it could have gone,” Shepard noted.
Or, as Jan might have considered it, a befitting end to a beautiful life.
This article appears in Dec 24 2025 – Jan 6 2026.
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