By the family

April 3, 2024: Jamie Dancer Randol was a devoted wife, sister, aunt, great aunt, intellectual, patron of the arts, humanitarian, and 45-year Bronxville, NY resident. She passed away peacefully on March 20 following a stroke four weeks prior.

Jamie Beth Randol was born on February 16, 1943, in Houston, Texas, at Saint Joseph Hospital to Ernest Jr. and Ada Dancer. She graduated from Stephen F. Austin High School in Houston, Texas in 1961.

During the summer between her sophomore and junior years of high school, she attended a mathematics and logic enrichment program at Rice University, where she first met Burton Randol, a Rice student who was teaching the class. Burton would subsequently earn his PhD from Princeton University and embark on a distinguished career as a professor of mathematics. Burton offered to give Jamie a ride home after one of the sessions, which began a lifelong relationship. Burton and Jamie corresponded by mail for over two years until she graduated from high school. She then attended Harvard University on a full scholarship awarded to her by the Firestone Corporation, which employed her father. At Harvard, she majored in mathematics. After her junior year, she and Burton married on June 19, 1964.

After graduating from Harvard in 1965, she experienced limited vocational choices, consistent with other female mathematics graduates, and began to teach school at Day Prospect Hill school in 1965. She worked as a teacher for several years at Day Prospect Hill and, in 1969, took a job at the Southern New England Phone Company as an assistant computer programmer.

In the late 1970s, She and Burton settled in Bronxville, NY, where they lived for over 45 years.

After demonstrating her abilities in the expanding mainframe computer field, she interviewed for a position with IBM to support the sales and marketing team by configuring hardware for demonstrations to large financial institutions. She spent over two decades at IBM in various roles and concluded her career with IBM in the corporate forecasting department in the late 1980s.

After leaving IBM, she took graduate courses and completed a master’s degree in biology at Einstein University. She then worked in research and taught high school. She retired in the mid-1990s, after which she earned landscape certificates at the New York Botanical Garden. She spent recent years landscaping her home gardens as well as developing and supporting modern dance performers. Jamie produced an award-winning dance film entitled “Stay With,” inspired by her husband’s health struggles at the end of his life.

Jamie is preceded in death by her father and mother, Ernest and Ada Dancer, and her adoring husband, Burton Randol. She is survived by her sister and brother-in-law, Cathy & Franklin Plagens of Dallas, Texas. Five nephews and nieces: Benjamin & Jane Randol of Wilton, Connecticut; Jeremy & Jessie Randol of Bedford, New York; Gordon Plagens of Owego, New York; Heather & Gary Rogers of Merit, Texas; and Andrew and Julie Plagens of Dallas, Texas. Jamie is also survived by numerous great nephews and nieces and adoring friends.