Nancy Hall was never afraid to say she was the smartest person in the room.

She knew she was good. Good at budgeting and financial planning, an expertise she offered to department stores and later nonprofit organizations. Good at talking politics and explaining why she was fiscally conservative yet socially progressive. Good at finishing puzzles, putting together masterful quilts, cross-stitching like a champ.

And those were just some of the skills her loved ones discussed at her recent celebration of life. Hall, a loving mother and partner, a devoted mentor and expert financial planner, died Dec. 21 of ovarian cancer. She was 77.

Hall was born in the tiny town of New Madison, Ohio, on Feb. 22, 1947. The first of two children was jokingly accused of having a chip on her shoulder after her brother stole her thunder when he was born days before her fourth birthday.

Her family owned a farm outside of town, so much of Hall’s early life was spent outdoors with animals. In high school, she was crowned “Miss Sheep” at the county fair, family said. (Later in life, Hall refused to eat lamb because it reminded her too much of her childhood pets, loved ones said.)

Hall knew she wanted to leave her hometown and “do something special in the world,” said her daughter, Lara Hall. No one in her family had gone to college, but Nancy Hall was confident she would.

“I don’t know that she knew where she would land as a career, but she knew it wasn’t as a wife,” said her stepdaughter, Alaina Brenick.

In 1965, she enrolled at New College in Florida. Her college experience was off to a promising start — and then, in her sophomore year, she became pregnant at 19.

She married Stephen Hall, the father of the baby, and resolved to not only stay in school, but to excel. With Lara on her hip, she graduated a year early.

She then followed her husband to Harvard Business School. The couple had really only gotten married because it was expected, their daughter said, and they divorced when she was 3.

Nancy Hall found herself a single mother in Massachusetts. She’d been working in retail but had her own dreams of attending business school.

If anything, it was an insurance policy to ensure her child had everything she needed. She registered Lara for kindergarten the same day she enrolled at Harvard Business School.

It was 1972, less than a decade after Harvard began accepting women to its MBA program. She graduated in the top 10% of her class, her daughters said. Afterward, she and Lara moved to New York City, and later Baltimore, as Nancy Hall started a career in department store finance.

Baltimore quickly became home. While her daughter was in middle and high school, she started performing stand-up comedy, just for fun. She even sold a joke to Joan Rivers, her daughters said. It’s not suitable for print.

In 1985, she met George Brenick at a bar at the Belvedere Hotel. It was a case of opposites attract: Hall was very serious and professional. George Brenick was, well, not that — “he was such a wacky guy, and they really were the yin and yang for each other,” said Lara Hall.

The couple married the next year. Alaina Brenick, 6 at the time, remembers watching her dad in a relationship “where he loved deeply and was loved deeply” — even when he got a perm, their daughter joked.

The same year, after Nancy Hall lost her job, the couple launched a nonprofit consulting business together called HB Financial. Nancy Hall really led the business, her daughters said, and her husband was along for the ride.

She had no professional nonprofit experience at the time but her father, the president of the school board in her hometown, had taught her the value of civic engagement.

Even with an active career, Nancy Hall always prioritized her daughters’ well-being.

George Brenick suddenly fell ill in 1998, and Nancy Hall made the decision to take him off life support. Alaina Brenick was 18 at the time, and Nancy Hall didn’t consult her.

She learned only recently, going through her mother’s diaries, that Nancy Hall made the thoughtful decision because she “wanted me to hate her instead of hating myself.”

“She showed love in really, really incredible ways, and oftentimes it was just silently,” Alaina Brenick said.

Nancy Hall continued working in nonprofit finance and, in 1992, co-founded the Maryland Association of Nonprofit Organizations. She served as chief financial officer until retiring in 2009 and was the self-proclaimed “grumpy old woman” of the office.

“She was brilliant,” said longtime friend Pat Cronin, who met Nancy Hall through nonprofit work. “No. 1, she could look at a spreadsheet, whether it was 5 million, 20 million, 100 million, and analyze it and give you the facts in five minutes.”

She worked with dozens of organizations throughout her tenure and also helped establish a nonprofit sector in Kyrgyzstan after the Soviet Union fell. It was always important to her to help others, whether through her work or by mentoring young people.

“She mentored people to help them understand those big picture and little picture things,” Cronin said.

She and Lara Hall eventually became coworkers — and, even now, her daughter refers to her as “Nancy” to other people.

“For years, when I first started out in my career, I was Nancy Hall’s daughter,” Lara Hall said. “Her reputation preceded me, and I think she was never prouder than when the shift happened when she became Lara Hall’s mom.”

After retiring, Nancy Hall still worked in the nonprofit world through her consulting business, which was rebranded as 501cSolutions. She worked as an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, where she taught nonprofit and public policy classes for two decades.

In 2010, she met her “sweetie,” William “Bill” Poole. Conversation came easy as they bonded over both having MBAs. They spent 15 years together, often watching the evening news and talking politics. Nancy Hall was a caring partner who helped Poole recover after emergency surgery, he said.

They also enjoyed sailing, visiting friends and eating out, Poole said.

“We spent quite a number of pleasant nights on harbors in the Chesapeake Bay, and she learned the elements of sailing,” Poole said.

Nancy Hall was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in August 2023. The diagnosis came totally out of the blue, and she struggled to accept it, family said. After chemotherapy, she felt good for about six months — then the cancer returned, more aggressive this time.

She decided to live exactly as she had before — by joking with friends and family, chatting with her daughters and, up until a week before she died, doing payrolls and answering client emails, loved ones said.

Toward the end, Nancy Hall became obsessed with a Harry Potter-themed baking show, one of many unserious TV shows she enjoyed, her daughters said. She unapologetically read tabloids and went to see silly plays.

In doing so, she taught her daughters to “embrace being a whole person, accepting quirkiness,” Alaina Brenick said.

“She was as much a professional and academic as she was trashy novels, trashy TV.”

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