obits

Eugene M. Darling, Jr., who served for 28 years as an environmental scientist with the federal government, died on February 12, 2023 at the age of 98.

Darling grew up in Wellesley as the son of the late E. Merrill Darling and Barbara T. Darling. After graduating from Wellesley High School in 1943, he served in the U.S. Army during the Second World War. He received an A.B. degree in mathematics from Harvard College in 1948 and an M.S. in meteorology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1953, where he was elected to the Sigma Xi Honor Society.

In the 1950s at the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories in Bedford, he studied the effect of meteorological factors on the performance of weapon systems.  In the 1960s, he conducted research on the utilization of meteorological satellite data at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. He later worked on artificial intelligence problems at the NASA Electronics Research Center in Cambridge. In the 1970s, he was chief of the Environmental Technology branch of the U.S. Department of Transportation, a position he held until his retirement in 1980. 

Darling served on the Board of Directors of the MIT Club of Boston for 25 years. He was a member of the Massachusetts Orchid Society and a founder of the New England chapter of the Indoor Light Gardening Society of America. He was especially fond of classic jazz and lectured annually at the Lincoln Library classic jazz series. He lived in Lincoln for many years and enjoyed a winter residence in Sarasota, Fla.

He leaves his sister, Patricia D. Andrews of South Bend, Ind., his nephew, Bruce L. Monteith of Ocala, Fla., and his niece, Teri S. Cousino of Berlin, Conn. Burial with U.S. Army military honors at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge will be private. 

Arrangements are under the care of Dee Funeral Home & Cremation Service of Concord, which provided this obituary. For Darling’s online guestbook, please visit www.DeeFuneralHome.com. 

October (Toby) Cullum Frost was born March 10, 1933 in New Bedford, Mass., to Eugene and Clementine Cullum and died on January 22, 2023 in Acton, Mass.

Toby was a bright and lively child. She met her future husband, Wesley Towne Frost, when she was 10 (he noticed her riding her pony) and they stayed in touch over the years. As a teen, she attended the Northfield School for Girls and then went to Radcliffe College (and was delighted after the “non-merger merger” of Radcliffe and Harvard to learn that she now had a degree from Harvard). She earned two master’s degrees — a master’s in education from Harvard and a master of arts in German from Middlebury College. Education was quite important to her. 

Toby and Wes married in 1955 and moved to the land that Wes owned as part of the Scott Nearing intentional community in Jamaica, Vt. They had two sons, Arlo and Rainer, and moved to Cambridge, Mass., and then Putney, Vt. Finally, in 1964, they settled in a small farmer’s cottage on land in what was then rural Lincoln, Mass. Wes and his sons built a home around the cottage that Toby truly loved and lived in until her final illness.

Toby loved words. As a German and Spanish teacher at Woburn High School, she imparted the appreciation of other languages to her students and led a student trip to Germany and other countries. Toby loved to play with words, spelling them in funny ways or making them up. She found fun and humor in that — humor was essential, she would say, to a healthy life. At the same time, she was a stickler for grammar. She’d correct you when you were speaking or would be unable to focus on the gist of an important letter if it was poorly crafted. So it was a natural step, after leaving teaching, to pursue a career as a technical writer, eventually retiring from Digital Equipment Corp. (now Hewlett-Packard). For several years after retiring, she contributed articles to the Lincoln Journal, sharing her views on current events.

Toby cared deeply about progressive issues. She was particularly focused on prison reform and believed deeply in the potential of restorative justice. She supported issues related to global peace, including nuclear disarmament, antiwar movements, and negotiation and communication across political divides. She also cared about the health of the planet and how we treat it. Her interests were wide ranging. She loved to read newspapers, especially the Boston Globe, and magazines from a variety of sources.

The oldest of four, Toby loved her sisters Holly, Mercy, and Merry and worked to help out their families over the years. Her nieces, in particular, note the positive influences she had in their lives.  Toby leaves behind her sons Arlo and his wife Stephanie, and Rainer and his wife Martha; her grandchildren Brendan, Riordan, Andrew, Annette, Kate and Henry; and her great-grandchildren, Imogen (Brendan), Arabella (Andrew), Oliver (Annette), and Theodosia (Kate).

A memorial service will be held in the spring in Lincoln. In lieu of flowers, Toby requested that donations be made to the charity of your choosing in her memory. The family would like to thank the staff of Atrius/Harvard Vanguard Concord, Mass General Oncology, Emerson Hospital, Life Care Center of Acton, and New England Hospice for their excellent care and support of Toby during this final illness.

Arrangements under the care of Concord Funeral Home, which provided this obituary.

There will be a public memorial gathering at the Pierce House in Lincoln on Saturday, Dec. 17 at 2 p.m. for the late Esther Braun, who died on November 26, 2022 at the age of 96.

Esther Althea Kaplan Braun was born on March 4, 1926 to Annie Sabin Levenson and Jacob Joseph Kaplan of Dorchester. She was their fourth child and only daughter. Her original middle name was Alma, which she did not like and later changed to Althea in honor of her dear maternal grandmother, Esther Alta.

Her family moved to Jamaica Plain in 1931. It was a busy household; her father, a polymath and well-known Boston attorney, and her musically gifted mother were both active in numerous civic and philanthropic activities and her mother often hosted events at their home. Esther attended the Seeger School in Jamaica Plan for grades 1-3, and the Agassiz School for grades 4-6, which she recalled as “uninspiring.” By her own recollection, she was fearless on a sled in the winter and mostly — but not always — well behaved at home and in school. Her brothers were 8-13 years older, so for many years she was the only child at home full time. Her parents tried unsuccessfully to interest her in the Jewish faith and its rituals (about which they were in fact becoming more casual themselves), but she did love the family’s Seder and holiday dinners for the food and gatherings with members of her parents’ large clans, many of whom she loved dearly. To her final days, she loved large family dinner gatherings, a love she passed on to new generations.

Esther’s parents bought a large plot of old, overgrown farmland in Scituate in 1924. Its 18th-century farmhouse and massive barn became their summer home. She did not know many children in Scituate, however, and so spent her childhood summers until 1936 essentially “free range,” playing in the woods and fields, and, in her younger years, in a large playhouse her father built for her, complete with interior lighting, miniature indoor plumbing, and room for her to crawl inside. Later, she went to overnight summer camps.

She and her husband Mort eventually built a house on part of the Scituate family lands. She then could spend at least part of every summer there with her own children, who thereby got to know her parents and their Kaplan aunts, uncles, cousins who also stayed or visited there most summers. There was always a big family cookout with lobster, clams, and corn cooked in large pots out in the yard.

Esther started at the elite, grueling Girl’s Latin School in the seventh grade, commuting by bus and streetcar by herself. Not only was the workload severe — her bookbag was backbreaking. Whether this was the start of the back problems she suffered later in life, we will never know. Though she had friends there, the workload and the commute were brutal and, after four years, she transferred to Thayer Academy in Braintree. Here she discovered her love of math (and later, organic chemistry as well) and her ability to thrive academically when taught in a positive rather than punitive educational environment.

Esther was 13 in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland, where many relatives on both sides of her family still lived. Letters stopped coming, the news on the radio and her own childhood experiences with antisemitism left her with a sense of foreboding, and her youngest brother went into the Army. She involved herself in volunteer work supporting the war effort and was forever after proud that her father invented the microfilm technology called V-mail (based on his patent for storing bank checks on microfilm) that allowed U.S. troops and their families to send mail back and forth in large volume throughout the war. In 1942 they also loaned their house to the Army for the residence of an officer and his family, while she and her parents lived in a hotel for the year; and in 1943 she spent her summer tending a field of potatoes for the army on the family’s Scituate lands, another of her father’s ideas to contribute further to the war effort.

She started college at Wellesley in 1943, after persuading the Chemistry Department to let her take a test in first-year organic chemistry. She passed that test well enough to skip their first-year organic chemistry class and graduated from Wellesley in 1947. That school year she also met a young naval officer and Harvard graduate, Mort Braun, on a blind double date arranged by mutual acquaintances, but not as each other’s dates! They soon figured out who they wanted to be dating, and things progressed from there.

Esther and Mort married in June 1947, and she continued to work in a blood chemistry lab until her pregnancy with her first child put an end to that. However, it did not end before her boss published a professional article on her work taking full credit for it himself, including for developing an improved method for measuring fibrin in blood, without a single mention of her name or position in the effort. She never forgave him or lost her determination to never again tolerate such male entitlement.

Esther became a full-time at-home mother with the birth of her first child, Peter, in 1949, then David in 1950, while Mort started his career in housing and city planning. They moved first to Boston, then to Brookline, and then into a house that Mort designed for them in Newton. Daughter Charlotte joined the family in 1953 and son Alan in 1957. Though they formed many close friendships in Newton, she and Mort wanted to live in a more rural area, and in 1959 bought property in Brown’s Wood in Lincoln. Mort again designed the house, and they moved there in 1960. The house included an attached greenhouse for her, in which she started each season’s garden crops and raised diverse flowering plants including an eventually huge Bird of Paradise, its occasional spectacular blooms a cause for household celebration.

In 1961, a ruptured disk in her back floored her. She refused surgery and, with everyone pitching in, she was able to return to full movement after a few months of careful rest. She suffered from back problems the rest of her life, but that did not stop her from becoming an avid organic gardener after she read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Her steadily expanding vegetable garden, and her consequently intensifying battle with the local deer and woodchucks became a constant topic of discussion and admiration thereafter. Her desire to have bird feeders up where she could watch them also drew her into battle with the local squirrels – a confrontation that she also continued for the rest of her life.

This same determination carried her into her next phase of life as her children all settled into full-time schooling. She and Mort became part of a small group that launched the Valley Pond Association and guided the construction of Valley Pond in Lincoln and Weston, a summer swimming and boating haven for local families ever since. In the early 1960s, Northeastern University began an experimental six-year, part-time program for “mature” adults to become teachers, in which she enrolled in 1963. One of the program’s components was a curriculum in what was called the “New Math,” in which she excelled. She graduated in 1969 and had the good fortune to be hired by the Lincoln Public Schools, where she had done some student teaching. This was a progressive school system, open to new approaches; she and another new teacher, Sue Reece, together taught a double-sized group of fourth- and fifth-graders in two connected classrooms, known fondly thereafter to generations of students as “Braun-Reece.” They divided much of the teaching topically rather than by room. Her specialties were science and math while

Sue’s were reading and language arts. She taught there with Sue until her retirement. Long before she retired, though, she started teaching a unit on the native peoples and prehistory of the northeast and became aware of how scant and bigoted the literature was on the topic. This resulted in a joint effort with her second son, a professional archaeologist, leading to their publishing a book, The First Peoples of the Northeast, in 1994. It has sold out multiple printings.

Esther’s life with Mort through the 1960s through the 1990s included dogs and cats, joyfully hosting grandchildren for summer vacations, numerous trips to England and Scandinavia, trips to the Caribbean (the latter sometimes with their young children), and, in later years, travel around the U.S. to see their increasingly widely scattered children and grandchildren. It also included frequent trips with friends to see Broadway shows in New York, raucous holiday parties with friends, and family visits with Mort’s New York City cousins including at their summer cottage on the Jersey shore. She also became proficient with software for recording family trees and, with Mort, prepared detailed trees for both of their vast families.

In 2001, she and Mort moved into an independent-living townhouse in Carleton-Willard Village in Bedford after Mort was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Mort died unexpectedly barely six months after they moved in, but not before he had helped her get her new garden plots going and her new bird feeders set up. She continued battling with squirrels over her bird feeders, and became a well-known figure at the Village, sitting on many committees, advocating for more sustainable landscape management practices including composting, and writing frequently for The Villager, the community’s newsletter. She helped organize the village library catalog and helped organize the still-ongoing growing of organic cherry tomatoes in quantity by village residents to add to the salad bar in the main dining room. She also stayed in touch with a vast network of family and friends and enjoyed frequent visits with her growing family of descendants – except during the pandemic, which frustrated her greatly. She began writing her memoirs, which she completed unfortunately only up through the 1970s before her death.

She died November 26 surrounded by her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. She is survived by her four children and their spouses, Peter and Diane, David and Ruth, Charlotte, and Alan and Dara; her five grandchildren and their spouses Doria and Curtis, Jake and Amy, Luke and Karla, Alanna and Tyler, and Brandon; and her four great-grandchildren, Ariana, Kai, Maya, and Matilda Esther.

In addition to the December 17 public memorial gathering at the Pierce House, Carleton-Willard Village will host its own private memorial gathering. Interment in the Lincoln Cemetery will be private.

Echoing her own bequests, donations in her memory may be made to Carleton Willard Homes, “The Resident’s Association Fund,” or (2) Carleton Willard Homes, “The Employee Appreciation Fund.”

Kalyana T. Mahanthappa, age 88, of Lincoln, formerly of Boulder, Colo., died peacefully on November 2, 2022. “K.T.,” as he was known to friends and colleagues, was a theoretical physicist and educator who loved travel, art, and classical music, and was a devoted husband and father.

Born in Tumkur, Karnataka (then the state of Mysore), India on May 1, 1934, K.T. grew up in several towns as his family moved in the state to follow his father, a high-ranking civil servant. Showing an early aptitude for math and science, he completed a B.Sc. with honors in Physics from Mysore Univ. (Bangalore) in 1954, followed by graduate studies at Delhi Univ. While working towards his M.Sc., somewhat on a whim, he thought to apply to graduate schools in the U.S. He completed one application, took it to the post office, and — stunned by the cost to mail it — decided to apply to only that one U.S. university. A few months later, he told his father he had been accepted to Harvard and insisted on going.

With M.Sc. in hand, he boarded a Norwegian freighter in Kozhikode (known then as Calicut) destined for New York with only a few passengers. He survived the voyage subsisting as a Hindu vegetarian on “stinky cheese” eaten at the captain’s table, squeaked through the Suez Canal just weeks before it closed due to the Second Arab-Israeli War, and finally arrived in Cambridge in 1956. K.T. was fortunate to have as his mentor and thesis advisor, the future Nobel laureate Julian Schwinger, and he was awarded a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics by Harvard University in 1961. 

His professional career thereafter focused on “grand unification theories, fermion mixings, and masses including charge fermions and neutrinos”, and his appointments spanned fellowships and faculty positions at UCLA, UPenn, the Inst. for Advanced Study (Princeton), and from 1966 onward, the Univ. of Colorado at Boulder, where he became full Professor in 1970 until retirement in 2014. In addition, were sabbatical fellowships at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (Trieste), Cambridge University, and Imperial College London. Among recognitions received, he was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1969.

Beyond his own research and teaching, for 25 years, K.T. took great pride in organizing, securing funding for, and leading the annual Theoretical Advanced Study Institute (“TASI”) in Boulder — an international gathering of scholars for lectures and workshops, a “rite of passage for most theoretical physicists in the US” as described by one of his former graduate students. Further to his academic legacy over 50 years, K.T. taught hundreds of undergraduates, trained, and mentored more than 20 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, and published over 140 research papers in respected journals, conference proceedings, and book chapters.

Beyond a life in physics, K.T. loved travel. With his family, he enjoyed hiking in his beloved foothills of Boulder, exploring National Parks throughout the American West, and sought out art and culture during sabbatical years in Europe. His globe-trotting via research conferences and workshops took him to over 30 countries over the years before finally moving to Lincoln in 2015. Throughout, he remained close to his roots through philanthropic support of educational and community service institutions in Karnataka.

K.T. is survived by his wife of 61 years, Prameela; his three sons, Nagesh and his wife Valentine Talland of Cambridge, Rudresh and his wife Pooja Bakri of Montclair, N.J., and Mahesh and his wife Kara Burrow of Edina, Minn.; and four grandchildren, Tara Talland, Talin, Freya, and Asha. Donations in his memory may be made to the Boulder County Parks & Open Space Foundation or to the National Park Foundation.

A Celebration of Life will be held at a later time; for additional information or to leave condolences, please visit his memorial page maintained by the Dee Funeral Home.

Judith Olga Györgypály Balogh, M.D., 92, of Lincoln, MA passed away on October 30, 2022. Judith had celebrated 67 years of marriage to Károly Balogh, M.D.

Dr. Balogh was born in Budapest, Hungary. The daughter of the director of the largest flour mill in Hungary, Judith, an only child, was raised to be an independent person. In her youth, shortly before World War II impacted Hungary, her family moved to their farm in the countryside in an attempt to be spared the ravages of war in the city.

In 1954, Judith graduated from Semmelweis Medical School in Budapest. As a medical student she was an extern in the Department of Physiology and was the coauthor of a publication on renal function in shock. She met Károly Balogh when they were both medical students, and they were married in January 1955. After her compulsory military service, she started her training in psychiatry at the National Institute of Neurology and Psychiatry in Budapest.

Shortly after the October 1956 Soviet invasion, Judith and Károly escaped the communist occupation by fleeing separately to Austria. Successfully reuniting in Vienna, the young doctor couple traveled to the United States on an International Rescue Committee chartered flight. The pilot tilted the plane to show the Hungarians the Statue of Liberty. They entered the U.S. through Camp Kilmer, NJ, and received a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship and posting at the Tulane Medical School in New Orleans. After a year in New Orleans, Judith and Károly packed their VW bug and moved to Boston. They first lived in Boston, then moved to Cambridge and started a family. They settled in 1971 in Lincoln, where they raised their children and have lived since.

In 1962, Dr. Judith Balogh completed her training as chief resident in psychiatry at Boston City Hospital, then was on the staff of the Massachusetts Mental Health Center as a child and adolescent psychiatrist. For ten years, she served as chief of Pediatric Psychiatry at Cambridge City Hospital. Judith marveled at the resilience of children faced with harsh and stressful situations. As part of her psychiatric training, Judith underwent psychoanalysis with the renowned psychiatrist Helene Deutsch, M.D., the last member of Freud’s original Viennese School of Psychoanalysts.

Judith took great joy in helping her patients and seeing them flourish after treatment. As a young psychiatrist in Budapest, she treated a young woman with schizophrenia, remaining by her side during the patient’s shock therapy. The patient was cured. Many of Judith’s patients remained in touch with her, decades after their treatment.

Judith and Károly had three children, Adam, Peter, and Anna. Judith made raising her family a priority. Judith and Károly have three grandchildren, Charlotte, Eva, and Alexander. Judith and Károly shared their athletic passions and love of the outdoors with their children, including skiing as regular season ticket holders for many years at Pleasant Mountain in Maine. Since her childhood, Judith excelled in ice skating and won several competitions in gymnastics.

In addition to music, art and culture in general, Judith was passionate about collecting and reading books and newspaper articles on a multitude of subjects, and she filled stacks of notebooks with her own thoughts, analysis, and story ideas. Growing up as a practical person during the uncertain times of World War II and Soviet occupation of her native country, Judith chose medicine, but had times been different, admitted she likely would have pursued a literary career.

Anyone who met Judith remembers her Hungarian accent, kindness, energy, directness, courage and wisdom. She is oftentimes remembered for her youthful exploits. Notably, as a two-year old, when her mother took an afternoon nap after a large Sunday meal, Judith would use her thumb and forefinger to pry open the eyes of her sleeping mother. A lively five-year-old child, Judith would intentionally skate through the joined arms of couples. As a 14-year old on her family’s farm during the war when the farm’s horses were requisitioned by the occupying German soldiers, she had to present the horses at the collection point. After the German veterinarian examined the horses, Judith simply drove off with Flóra and Fácán (Flora and Pheasant).

Soon came the Soviet occupying soldiers. Judith, along with many of the village females, were hidden in haylofts to avoid rape. When she spotted a Soviet soldier taking Flóra, she ran out of hiding, grabbed the bridle of the horse on which the soldier sat, and pulled him off. Fortunately she was not shot or raped. At her first encounter with a Soviet soldier she was puzzled when he reached down to take her pulse. Thus she lost her wristwatch but saved Flóra a second time and survived to tell the story. At a tense point in the war when the Soviets were entering the village, some Germans were still present at the other end. Had the Soviets realized this, the entire village would have been killed for hiding them. Judith ran through the thick mud of the village to tell the Germans to leave, saving the village. She was interviewed as part of the Hungarian 1956 Memory Project. 

Her adventurous nature never subsided. Well into her fifties, when her car broke down and a young male motorcycle rider offered her a ride to the nearest gas station, ever the sportslady, she thought nothing of getting on the back of the motorbike.

A graveside service for family and local friends was held on Friday, November 4th at the Lincoln Cemetery. A Celebration of Life for the family and friends will be held at a future date.

The Balogh family wishes to acknowledge their gratitude to the staff at the Waltham Crossing Benchmark facility and Caring Hospice Services where Judith spent her final days in their compassionate care.

In lieu of flowers, please consider honoring the memory of Dr. Judith G. Balogh with a donation to the BrightFocus Foundation’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research fund (22512 Gateway Center Drive, Clarksburg, MD 20871); Special Olympics (512 Forest St., Marlborough, MA 01752); or, Reach Out and Read (89 South St., Suite. 201, Boston, MA 02111).

Arrangements are under the care of Dee Funeral Home & Cremation Service of Concord, which provided this obituary. Readers are invited to leave a note on her online tribute wall.

A memorial service will be held at the First Parish in Lincoln on Wednesday, Oct. 26 at 3:30 p.m. for longtime Lincoln resident Colin Louis Melville Smith, who died on October 20. Remote viewers can watch the livestream here. 

Colin was born just before midnight in Burnley, England on December 30, 1933. Since his twin sister Pat was born a few minutes after midnight, they always had different birthdays. He was fond of telling the story about when his young father heard news of the delivery and asked the obstetrician, “Is it a girl or a boy?” The puzzling answer was: “Both.”

Colin grew up biking long distances along the stone-walled lanes of Lancashire, and he was proud that he always used to run the whole length of his paper route. Since he was skilled at drawing, the idea of studying architecture appealed to him. His father thought he should find his first job and contribute to the family upkeep. Colin defied his father by obtaining a scholarship to the Architectural Association in London. 

After completing his studies at the AA, he applied for a scholarship to the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He said it was the only university he had heard of in the U.S. and he thought it would be fun to visit America. It came as a shock that he had to study quite hard. He was kept busy at the Cambridge home of Charlie and Barbara Rockwells where he lived, helped with baby baths in the evening, and formed a life-long friendship. His touring plans had to be put off until the next summer when he and his friend Walter Thomson traveled across the U.S. in an old wood-paneled station wagon. They made it out to California and picked peaches in Modesto where it was 110 degrees in the shade. The local newspaper, the Modesto Bee, learned about them and sent a reporter out. Their picture behind crates of Del Monte peaches appeared on the front page of the Newspaper with the headline: “Harvard graduates help with peach harvest.”

When Colin’s Graduate School of Design professor Walter Gropius started a new firm, The Architects Collaborative, he hired his best students, including Colin, who commented that it was exciting to be in charge of a whole project. He said that if he had stayed in London he probably would have been designing bathrooms for a society architect. When Ben Thompson left TAC in 1966 to form his own firm, he, like Gropius, took with him his prized employees and again, Colin was one. 

In 1969 Colin and a small group went on their own to form ARC/Architectural Resources Cambridge. Their work at TAC and BTA gave them a foundation as respected and capable architects and enabled them to begin a firm that is still flourishing in its 53rd year.

Their first major project was the Kennedy School of Government in which Colin played a major role. Colin went on to be the partner in charge of school and university projects at Buckingham, Browne and Nichols, Tufts, Syracuse, New York University, Russell Sage, UMC, Pappajohn Business School at the University of Iowa, and University of Missouri. He also was involved in projects for Digital Equipment, Lotus, and a historic renovation in Philadelphia for Design Research. Colin was a steady hand guiding the firm. His charm, grace, and good humor, served with a British accent, were appealing to everyone.

Colin was an active member of the Boston Society of Architects and was named a Fellow by the American Institute of Architects. He was appointed to the Massachusetts Designer Selection Board, whose responsibility was to appoint talented architects for major state projects.

Colin was married to Diana Dennison in 1970. They lived in Lincoln with their two children, Adrian and Isabel. Colin loved Lincoln and participated in Lincoln’s community life at many levels. He chaired the Lincoln Historic District Commission for over 20 years. He was also responsible for facilities at the First Parish Church in Lincoln, where he joked that when a lightbulb needed changing, he would receive a call. He saved the church’s leaning steeple from falling into the sanctuary with a major rebuild project in the mid-1980s. He would climb the scaffolding every morning to check on the work before he left for his office.

Colin loved to read and pursued his many interests by delving into all the books he could find on a subject. Books on British History and royalty, 18th-century English furniture and silver, Chinese porcelain, art history and the vagaries of the art market, French wine, the climbers of Mount Everest, and the Romanov family still fill up the family bookshelves.

Always interested in meeting new people and seeing new places, Colin had an international outlook that was unusual in his generation. He camped out under the stars inside the Parthenon in the 1950s, and he and Diana visited Hong Kong, Bali, Thailand, India, Nepal, Iran, Peru, Israel and Egypt, among many places. His close friends spanned many cultures and countries, from India to Switzerland to Iran and the U.K. as well as the U.S.

He is survived by his wife, Diana Smith; his children, Adrian Smith and Isabel Smith Margulies; two grandchildren, Alexia Margulies and Julia Margulies; his twin sister Pat Stephenson; his brother Gordon Smith; and an adored cousin, Linda Ramsden. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in honor of Colin Smith to the First Parish in Lincoln (14 Bedford Rd., Lincoln, MA  01773).

In the October 7 edition of News Acorns, the wrong day of the week was given for the memorial service for Bob Lemire. The correct day is Saturday (not Sunday), October 22. 

In the Squirrel calendar, the wrong ending time was listed for the Phinney’s Holiday Festival on November 6. It will run from 11 a.m.–4 p.m. at the Pierce House.

George W. Thomas, 89, of Lincoln, died on Tuesday, October, 11, 2022. He was the devoted husband for 64 years of Jane (Volpe) Thomas.

George was born in Waltham to George and Ella Thomas on April 10, 1933. After graduating from Waltham High School, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force, where he served honorably for four years and received his discharge as a staff sergeant in 1955.

For many years, George was an aviation mechanics instructor at East Coast Aero Tech. He later became the director of education.

A longtime Lincoln resident, he was a faithful parishioner and usher at St. Joseph Church. One Christmas he repaired and repainted the figures for both the inside crèche and the outside crèche. A few years later, when the priest wanted an ambry for the holy oils, he asked if George could hang one.  When he realized the high cost of the ambry, George went out, bought the materials, and built the one that is still in use. George also served his community as a volunteer firefighter and EMT. He was involved with the Boy Scouts and enjoyed being a merit badge counselor.

He loved family and friends and enjoyed everything related to aviation. He also loved crafting model airplanes, ships, locomotives and jewelry, as well as painting at the Lincoln Open Studio. He could almost always be found at his workbench, building something. He could fix anything.

In addition to his wife, he leaves behind a son, Dr. Henry Thomas and his wife Jai of Stow; two grandchildren, Justin Sundell-Thomas and his husband Ryan O’Donnell, and Lillian Sundell-Thomas and her fiancé Robert Hoover; his sister, Sandra Harris and her husband Andrew, along with two nephews, Jim Harris and his wife Lisa, and Paul Harris. He was preceded in death by two children, Anthony and Jenifer Thomas. 

Family members will gather for a private burial service with military honors at Lincoln Cemetery.

In lieu of flowers, contributions in his memory may be made to the Society of St. Vincent de Paul Lincoln/Weston (SVdP), P.O. Box 324, Lincoln, MA 01773. Arrangements are under the care of Dee Funeral Home & Cremation Service of Concord; click here to leave a memory or condolence.