Bonnie Beeferman

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Personal

Vocation

Lifestyle

Family

American teacher of languages and English. She was married Harvey in June 1964 and has two sons, Daniel and Douglas. A fetal hibernation case, her mom swears that Bonnie was in the womb for ten months. After working for the same company since 1963, Harvey's company sold and he took early retirement. They decided to live on their savings in "paradise," so moved to beautiful Hilton Head Island, SC in November 1991. Their house overlooks the Club Course. When her mother died, fortunately Bonnie inherited the money that her dad had intended for her when he died 33 years before, giving her and Harvey financial stability in spite of early retirement. She has an office with a lovely view of the golf greens where she can keep up her Dictionary Project and her hobby, for many years, of astrology. With Harvey's retirement, Bonnie had to leave a job that she loved, teaching English as a Second Language, but was glad to get away from Chicago and her mother. A caring parent and happily married, Bonnie considers that she has had a great mother-in-law and a wonderful daughter-in-law as some sort of compensation for a dreadful mother. (She died on 9/17/1999, not leaving happy memories for her family.) In 1993, Bonnie started a non-profit-venture called The Dictionary Project. She and a neighbor (Bonnie does most of the work by mutual decision) have given local children 18,000 dictionaries since then. Lots of work, no salary, but great rewards in seeing the kids' faces. Both their boys are high IQ; Bonnie and Harvey were both tested in the low 130s. She died on November 11, 2008 at age 66 in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.