Sylvia Taft Lotspeich, 87, teacher

Sylvia Taft Lotspeich, 87, a vibrant, loving woman and an avowed Quaker who taught a combination first- and second-grade class at Germantown Friends School for 17 years, died June 26 at the Kendal retirement community in Hanover, N.H., where she had moved six days earlier. She had been in ailing health since April.

Mrs. Lotspeich, the granddaughter of William Howard Taft, the 27th president of the United States, was a resident of the Mount Airy section of Philadelphia for 40 years. After she retired from teaching in 1986, she continued to work at the school in a parenting program.

She was an outgoing woman "who had friends much younger than herself, and friends of her own generation," said her daughter Sylvia Lotspeich Greene. "We all adored her."

The daughter of Charles Phelps Taft and his wife, Eleanor, Mrs. Lotspeich was born at the family's summer home in Narragansett, R.I., but grew up in Cincinnati. She attended the Lotspeich School, where she met her future husband, William, when they were first graders. The school was founded by his mother.

Mrs. Lotspeich married her husband in 1942, the year after she graduated from Vassar College. She later earned a master's degree in education from the University of Rochester.

Her husband was a physiologist who taught at the University of Cincinnati and the University of Rochester medical schools. Mrs. Lotspeich and her husband had become interested in Quakerism during a stay in Oxford, England, and he took the position of executive director of the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia in 1967. He died the next year.

Mrs. Lotspeich served on the American Friends Service Committee board until her death. She supported children in other countries through the Foster Parents Plan, then called Childreach. She volunteered for the Vassar Show House each spring and was chairwoman of the scholarship committee at Germantown Friends.

She was a frequent correspondent in an age when few people write letters, and an avid reader, golfer, and tennis player, her daughter said.

"She was an amazing correspondent who wrote not only copious numbers of old-fashioned letters and notes, but joined the computer age with relish and e-mailed everyone as well, keeping up with friends from the three cities where she had lived the longest," Green said.

In addition to her daughter, Mrs. Lotspeich is survived by sons Charles and Stephen; two brothers; a sister; eight grandchildren; and two great-granddaughters.

A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. Saturday at the Germantown Friends Meeting, 47 W. Coulter St. in Philadelphia. Burial is private.

Memorial donations may be made to the American Friends Service Committee, 1501 Cherry St., Philadelphia 19102.