Remembering Ingeborg Therese Longerich Snipes
Inge Snipes died peacefully on the evening of April 6, 2022 at Kendal at Longwood in Kennett Square, PA. She was 94 years old. She had an active and full life guided by Quaker principles and her passions for social justice, environmental concerns, the arts, and her love for her family. She always took it for granted that she would outlive her mother, who lived to 96 years of age, but that was not to be.
Inge was born in Haan, Germany in 1927. In 1930 she emigrated aboard the S.S. Berlin to the US with her sister Hildegard and mother Ida Longerich. There they joined her father Rudy who had emigrated two years earlier. The family lived first in Union City, New Jersey, and later through Inge’s school years in Pequonock, Patterson, Haledon and Clifton, New Jersey.
In 1944, at the age of 16, she graduated from Clifton High School. Through her school years, she worked at her father’s restaurant, Rudy’s Lunch. Inge was raised Roman Catholic in her early years. In 1941, while Inge was in high school, her mother took her to visit Montclair Friends Meeting after a disagreement with their Catholic priest. This introduction to Quakerism would become a major influence in her life, leading her to become active in many causes. Two years later, at the age of 17, she applied for membership in the Religious Society of Friends.
After graduating from high school, she began working in clerical jobs and attended night school at Patterson State College. Soon after, Montclair Friends Meeting offered her a scholarship to Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina. Before leaving for Guilford, Montclair Meeting sent her to an American Friends Service Committee summer camp devoted to international relations. This was an eye-opening experience for someone who had never read a newspaper. The multi racial and ethnical mix of her co-campers and exposure to international issues was an exciting development for her. She later said that the Quaker attitudes and ideals helped form her actions for the rest of her life.
At Guilford she continued to expand and explore her new interests. In addition, she was selected to the North Carolina All State hockey team, sang in the Guilford College A Cappella Choir, and learned to play the piano. About her piano playing, she admitted that she was neither a gifted nor avid player.
As a sophomore at Guilford, she first met her future husband, Bradshaw Snipes. She recalled her first impression, “the light of God shines through his eyes.” They became engaged after Inge’s junior year. The next year she graduated with majors in Spanish and education from Guilford. Later that year, on September 10, 1949, Brad and Inge married at Montclair Friends Meeting.
After college and getting married, and a five-day honeymoon, Inge and Brad immediately began working at Brad’s high school alma mater George School, a Quaker high school in Newtown, Pennsylvania. They started as interns and the next year were promoted to the regular staff as teachers. Before leaving after four years, Inge had become the assistant dean of girls as well as girl’s hockey coach. While at George School, Inge and Brad’s first child, Hannah was born in 1953.
In the summer of 1953, Inge and Brad left George School to move to and run Brad’s family farm. Amy, Dan and Anne were born during the following years. Together with her sister-in-law Barb Snipes, who had six children, Inge focused on caring for and raising a healthy family. On one occasion, as the two mothers watched over their flock of active children, Inge stated, “If the fathers saw us now, they’d think we had nothing to do. But that’s the job.” And she adored it.
At the same time in the late 50s and early 60s, social issues became national issues. In 1957, to promote racial equality and integration, Inge was active in helping the Meyers, a black family move into all white Levittown. Angry mobs protested nightly while Inge and others stood vigil outside the Meyers’ house to protect the family.
Joining the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and Women Strike for Peace, Inge was active in many social, cultural and environmental issues. She joined protests atomic atmospheric testing. Studies showed that Strontium 90 was released by the testing, which led to contamination of milk and food supplies, and even was present on the family farm. Children were especially susceptible to absorbing Strontium 90 and its effects, thus Inge’s great concern. The protests led to an atmospheric test ban in 1963.
Protests militarism, the Vietnam War and unequal civil rights were other prominent issues that concerned Inge. In March of 1963, she went to Poland with the WILPF to visit the Polish Women’s League. Despite common goals, further contact was discouraged and eventually prevented by the communist Polish government afraid of the infiltration of outside ideas. Later in 1963, Inge along with her brother-in-law Sam Snipes attended the civil right rally in Washington, DC where Martin Luther King gave his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.
In 1968, as her children grew older and more independent, Inge became interested in Re-evaluation Counseling, a peer counseling program. For the next ten years she was active in Re-evaluation Counseling. Together with Carol Bemmels, she opened Personal Counselors of Bucks County, offering classes, workshops and intensive sessions.
After the counseling center closed, following a pattern that would repeat itself often, Inge shifted focus, following her interests and passions into a new field. In 1980, the family farm business was expanding and Inge became the new self-appointed General Manager. During the following years, Snipes Farm and Nursery continued to expand, taking on two new branch locations and entering the list of top 100 garden centers in the US.
After 10 years as a business manager, Inge again changed her focus by retiring and taking up photography. Following her passion and creative drive, she dove into photography, joining clubs, traveling to distant shooting locations and staging exhibitions. Moving from film to digital to computer generated images, she progressed from landscape and nature photography to seeking colorful patterns in her surroundings. These she then intensified through computer manipulations to produce color saturated abstract compositions. This would become another constant in her life, seeking out and surrounding herself with color and colorful compositions.
In the early 2000s, Brad’s health declined and he moved to Crosslands care facility in Kennett Square, PA. With her children grown and departed, and her husband no longer present at home, Inge moved to a colonial era house in Yardley, PA. There she continued and intensified her photographic projects, eventually winning National Geographic and University of California photo contests.
In 2006, Inge moved to Kendal at Longwood retirement and care community. As usual, at Kendal she followed her passions and interests, becoming active in the Horticultural Committee, forming the Kendal Bonsai Society, singing in the choir, eating meals with the German club, swimming with the aquatics classes, joining the memoirs club and winning at croquet. Her memoirs “Only in America” describes in her own words how a poor immigrant girl, given the chance and support, evolved into a thriving individual, committed to Quaker ideals, active and socially involved in her community. She wrote, “By sending me to Shawnee-on-the Delaware, a week-long camp on international relations…sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee, Montclair Friends illuminated to me their deepest philosophical groundings, and made their ideals mine.”
Always devoted to her family, she wrote that her happiest moments were with her children around her.
Inge and Brad are survived by their children - Hannah Hogan, Amy Snipes, Daniel Snipes, Anne Snipes Moss, ten grandchildren and sixteen great grandchildren. In lieu of flowers donations can be made to the American Friends Service Committee or Kendal Charitable Funds.