Connie Lewis
Connie Lewis died peacefully March 2 in hospice care at Carleton-Willard Village in Bedford after a brief illness.
An only child, Connie was born on August 3, 1936, in DeKalb County, Ga. to Constance (Adams) Lewis and Albert Washington Lewis Jr. Both parents died young, so Connie was raised with love by her mother’s sister-in-law, Hortense (Horne) Adams — Aunt Horty.
Connie graduated from Sophie Newcomb College (then the sister school associated with all-male Tulane). She went on to earn M.S. degrees from Cornell University in English and from Harvard University in counseling and consulting psychology.
She held a variety of positions in pursuit of her two loves, writing and teaching. She worked at an Atlanta newspaper, taught at Beaver Country Day School in Chestnut Hill, and taught freshman writing at both the Drexel Institute of Technology (now Drexel University) and Simmons College (now Simmons University). A few years later, she realized there was no future in that job, so reinvented herself as a technical writer. She took a course in BASIC at UMass-Boston and joined the startup Interleaf as one of the first few employees. She worked until her retirement as a technical writer at several tech companies. Once retired, she continued to teach writing by running memoir-writing groups at both Bemis Hall and The Commons in Lincoln.
Connie moved to Battle Road Farm in Lincoln in 1997, where it is alleged that she grew amazing Christmas cacti, conjured hummingbirds from nowhere, and made the best Hoppin’ John ever experienced in New England. She also lent her talents to the condominium handbook and served on the garden committee for many years.
An antiwar activist, Connie protested both the Vietnam and Iraq wars, holding signs weekly on busy street corners. She was also a stalwart feminist, supporting female candidates financially and fighting sexism in the work place. Connie was also active at the local level, serving on Lincoln town boards including the Housing Commission, the Historical Society, and Friends of the Council on Aging. She was a fixture at the Lincoln Town Meeting, spoke out in the local paper, and wrote voter mobilization postcards by the hundreds. Connie was also a highly knowledgeable fan and supporter of music. She was a patron for many years of Symphony Nova, a training orchestra for young musicians.
Most of all, Connie was an exemplary friend. She built long-standing friendships with both her age peers and people decades younger than herself. Thus it was that during her final months, Connie was surrounded by and cared for by friends of long standing, a family not by blood but by heart. She will be widely missed.
There will be a memorial gathering in Lincoln this spring on a date yet to be determined.
