Robert Lemire
By Elise Lemire
Robert Arthur Lemire, a long-time resident of Lincoln, died on June 8, 2022 at The Commons in Lincoln after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. He was 89.
Bob was born in Lowell, Mass., on January 19, 1933, the third child of Emile and Blanche (Bisaillon) Lemire. Upon graduating from St. Jeanne d’Arc School, where classes were conducted in English and French, he received permission from Cardinal Cushing to attend Lowell High School. He graduated in 1950 as a member of the varsity track and field and football teams and was honored as a Distinguished Alumnus in 2015.
Bob continued to play football at Yale University, from which he graduated with a degree in economics in 1954, before serving two years in the Navy as a junior officer on the heavy cruiser, U.S.S. Baltimore. After receiving an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1958, Bob wrote case studies for a Boston consulting firm and then worked in corporate underwriting at Paine, Webber, Jackson & Curtis, during which period he and Howard Reynolds had a nightly radio show called Spotlight on Business. In the mid-1970s, Bob started and for decades ran his own one-man investment advisory firm, Lemire and Co. During these early career years, Bob was an avid rugby player and in 1960, he was one of the founders of the Boston Rugby Club, for which he was inducted into the club’s Hall of Fame in 2010.
Bob was a committed environmentalist. He joined the Lincoln Conservation Commission in 1963, becoming the chair three years later and serving in that role for fifteen years, during which time the town put 1,400 acres into permanent conservation. He traveled the country teaching other communities how to cluster new development and thereby save open space and taught these principles at the Rhode Island School of Design, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and the Conway School of Landscape Design.
In 1972, the Massachusetts Audubon Society awarded Bob its Action Award. Gov. Michael Dukakis appointed him to the Massachusetts Agricultural Preservation Commission and to the Citizens Water Supply Committee, for which Bob served several years as a member of the executive committee. Bob was also a consultant for the Nature Conservancy, the Conservation Foundation, and other national organizations. He is the author of Creative Land Development: Bridge to the Future (Houghton Mifflin, 1979).
In 1984, after watching his dyslexic son struggle to learn to read, Bob created Lexia Learning, a company that pioneered the use of computers to teach literacy skills. Today the company serves more than 5.5 million students across more than 3,300 school districts.
Bob was predeceased by his sister Gabrielle Marie (Lemire) Jussaume and his brother John (“Jack”) Emile Lemire. He leaves behind his beloved wife of 61 years, Virginia (Bock) Lemire; his daughter, Elise Lemire and her husband, James T. Taylor II of Port Chester, N.Y.; his son, Robert “Bo” Lemire and his wife Melissa (Strong) Lemire of Castle Rock, Colo.; and three grandchildren, Eli James Taylor-Lemire, Zachary Burk Lemire, and Sophia Grace Lemire.
Bob will be fondly remembered for his leadership skills, sense of humor (with jokes on hand in both French and English), love of fishing, camping, and hiking, and for his enthusiasm for his wife’s homemade cookies.
There will be a memorial service at a later date. In lieu of flowers, a donation to the International Dyslexia Association would be appreciated.
