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Ingeborg Von Hagen Jacobi, formerly of Southampton, died May 6. She was 97.
Known as “Inge,” she was born on November 13, 1917, in Manhattan. She moved to Southampton in the early 1940s following a life-altering family tragedy, carrying on to create a space in which her children could succeed. Survivors said she rewarded excellence in her children while never making it a condition to receive the full measure of her love and was a large and welcoming soul whom neighborhood children sought out in times of distress, or for counsel when the vagaries of their lives put them in need.
Ms. Jacobi often said that the ocean called to her, and it was at Coopers Beach in Southampton that she taught her children to jump the waves at 4, and dive into them at 5, and to play dishrag in the surf drop. It was there where she read, walked, and occasionally sang, remembering the duets that she had sung with her sister, a Juilliard graduate and coloratura, who died at the age of 28.
She retired to Arizona in the early 1980s with her husband, Henry, and upon his death in 1989 resided there with her daughter, Ruth. She loved Arizona and her daughter’s horses and gardens on her small farm just west of Sedona, but always felt the tug of the ocean. She was an avid reader, and devoured science magazines; new discoveries brought her to a sense of wonder usually seen only in the young, and animated her conversations, survivors said. Ideas and concepts interested her; politics and celebrity did not. An atheist with a sharp intellect, her good humor and generous wit never left her, survivors said, even as she directed the logistics of her final directives.
She is survived by her two children, Peter Jacobi of Virginia and Ruth Jacobi of Arizona.
on Sep 7, 2015