Sylvia Marjorie Tuft was in her mid- to late 70s when she decided to take a cruise around the world.

But she wasn't interested in the typical cruise-line experience, with its luxury cabins, buffet lines and preplanned excursions.

Instead, she booked herself on a freighter, one of about a dozen passengers who roughed it alongside the crew, discussed seafaring each night with the captain and waited at each port as freight was loaded on and off the ship.

Taking the freighter was more economical, said her youngest son, Charles Tuft, but also more of an adventure.

Along the way, for example, the ship took in a boatload of Vietnamese refugees, allowing Tuft to use nursing skills she honed while working in her husband's medical office 40 years earlier.

"She had some great stories," Charles Tuft said.

Sylvia Tuft died Aug. 8 at Brookdale Senior Living in Lakewood. She was 95.

A native of Ventnor, N.J., Tuft grew up sailing on the bay near Atlantic City on a boat her firefighter father helped confiscate from rum runners, Charles Tuft said.

She attended nursing school on the East Coast and was working as a nurse when she met Harold Tuft, a physician who later became her husband.

When Harold Tuft went to the front lines of World War II, she nursed wounded soldiers who returned to the United States. When he opened his allergy practice, she worked alongside him.

The couple had three sons: Daniel, Edward and Charles. About 50 years ago the family moved to Denver, where Harold Tuft's expertise was in demand to treat asthma patients who had come to Colorado for its clean air, Charles Tuft said.

Sylvia Tuft quit working to spend time with her sons, and she insisted they embrace life and its adventures as she did.

Early on winter mornings, she would drop the boys off at Union Station so they could take the ski train, building their skills on the slopes.

She made sure they learned to golf and swim and signed them up for after-school activities such as band.

"It wasn't about her," Charles Tuft said. "We were the deal."

When Charles was in college, his mother won about $4,000 betting at the track in Arapahoe County where her husband owned and trained racehorses.

She used it all to buy Charles the car she'd heard him talking about with his brothers - an Alfa Romeo.

Sylvia Tuft traveled extensively, going to Russia with her husband on a State Department- sponsored trip before the fall of the Iron Curtain, taking a cruise through the Panama Canal and riding across Canada by train with a friend.

"She had a great life," Charles Tuft said.

The family planned a private memorial atop Vail Mountain.

In November, they will board a sailboat owned by one of Sylvia Tuft's sons and scatter her ashes in the Atlantic Ocean.

burnetts@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5343