Virginia Rundell

With deep sadness, the family of Virginia Quinn Rundell announces her passing on Wednesday, January 10 of complications from cancer.

The arc of Virginia’s life and career was filled with renewal and re-invention centered around her love of the English language, clarity, precision and grace in written communication, and her commitment to collegiality and consideration of the people around her.

A 1973 graduate of Peabody Veterans Memorial High School, Virginia received her Bachelor of Arts in English, magna cum laude, from Salem State University in 1977, followed by her Master of Arts in English Literature from Tufts University in 1981. Following early work in development and recruiting with the New England Board of Higher Education and Tufts University, Virginia began a career pivot to architecture with studies at the Boston Architectural College. Melding that interest with her background in communications, she launched a career in professional services marketing, starting with several Boston-area architecture and engineering firms, where she met her future architect-husband, Rick Rundell.

This was followed by the start of her own business, advising design firms on the designer-selection processes for state agencies, and culminated with five years as Marketing Director for Goody Clancy, a prominent Boston-area architecture firm. During this time she was also an energetically contributing member of the Boston Chapter of the Society for Marketing Professional Services, including service on the board. Virginia continued marketing and editorial consulting as she and Rick entered their child-rearing years, including over a decade as Associate Editor for ArchitectureBoston magazine, and doing myriad editorial projects for design-related organizations including Historic New England and the Urban Land Institute.

In 2012 Virginia moved with her family to Lincoln, Mass., and rapidly took on volunteer roles supporting the community, chairing the Pierce House Property Committee and serving on the Advisory Board for Friends of Modern Architecture/Lincoln. She also returned at this time to a lifelong dream of becoming a librarian. While working at the Watertown Free Public Library then the Boston Athenæum, Virginia pursued graduate studies, including internships with the historical collections at Mount Auburn Cemetery and the Gottlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University. She received her Master of Library and Information Science from Kent State University in 2018. In 2021 she combined her passion for civic engagement with her passion for libraries and archives in a new role as the Town Archivist for Lincoln, where she continued to work actively at both Town Hall and Lincoln Library sites until just a few short months before her passing.

Virginia’s love of the written word was matched only by her love of singing. She was delighted with the launch of Revels Singers in 2012 and sang and volunteered with them for many years. She also sang with the Harvard-Radcliffe Chorus over the last few years and joined two seasons of the Oxford Churchmusic summer choral experience.

A devoted wife, loving mother, wise counselor, and tactful diplomat, Virginia leaves her loving husband, Richard (“Rick”) Rundell, daughter Elisabeth (“Ellie”) Rundell of Somerville, son Ford Rundell and his wife, Katie (Cook) Rundell of Lovell, Wyoming; sister Anne Quinn of Peabody, brother Michael Quinn of Dublin, Ohio, and beloved aunt Irene Zielski of Peabody. Virginia was predeceased by her parents, Michael R. and Helen V. (Zielski) Quinn of Peabody, Massachusetts.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in Virginia’s name to The Friends of the Lincoln Library, 3 Bedford Rd., Lincoln, MA 01773 (www.lincolnpl.org).

Arrangements are under the care of Concord Funeral Home (75 Belknap St., Concord MA, 978-369-3388), which provided this obituary. Click here to visit Virginia’s online guest book.

Jane L. Bartter

Jane Lillard Bartter died peacefully on December 15, 2023, at the age of 102.

Jane was born on July 10, 1921, in Marion, the daughter of Walter Huston and Ethel Hazen Lillard. Because her father was headmaster of Tabor Academy, she was one of only four girls to attend the all-boys school at the time, graduating in 1937. Jane did a postgraduate year at the Knox School before attending Smith College, where she majored in early education and child development.

Jane’s career as an educator was put on hold. World War II broke out as she graduated and was drafted by Naval Intelligence to serve in the war effort. She served in Washington, D.C., for the next two years as one of a group of young women now referred to as the “Code Girls.” The Code Girls worked to decipher coded Japanese transport messages, helping the Navy to identify and destroy war supply ships.

During this time, she met her future husband, Frederic C. Bartter, a Harvard-trained doctor. The two were married in 1946 and spent the first year in Guatemala, where Fred was posted by the Public Health Service to research a tropical eye disease affecting U.S. troops. They moved to New York the following year, where Jane was hired as director of recreational therapy at Presbyterian Hospital. When Fred was appointed an intern at Mass General Hospital in 1948, the couple moved to Boston. Jane was assistant director of the Simmons College Nursery School for a year and then director of the Laboratory School at Children’s Hospital.

In 1951, Fred was appointed chief of the Endocrine-Hypertension Branch at the National Institutes of Health, and the couple moved yet again, this time to Washington, D.C., where they would raise their three children, Frederic Jr., Thaddeus, and Pamela.

Jane joined the staff of the Norwood School in Bethesda, Md., in 1959, where she spent the next 18 years teaching kindergarten and eventually taking on administrative roles, including assistant to the director and a stint as acting director. Upon her retirement, she was hailed as “dedicated and devoted, concerned and perceptive — always giving more of herself physically and of her talents and time than was ever expected.”

When Fred retired from the Public Health Service in 1978, he took a position at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio. The couple loved the Spanish influence and heritage of the city. Jane retired from teaching and started a new venture importing clothing and folk art from Central and South America, drawing on her time in Guatemala as a newlywed.

Jane remained in Texas after Fred’s sudden death in 1983 but eventually moved to Lincoln in 2010 to be close to her daughter and grandchildren. Always wanting to be useful, she immediately volunteered at Codman Community Farms, answering the phone and doing accounting. Incredibly, at 93, she volunteered two mornings per week at the Lincoln Schools, tutoring first graders in reading. She also joined the Church Service League at St. Anne’s-in-the-Fields.

Jane was a devoted wife and mother. She was also passionate about dogs, animal rights, feeding the hungry, and effecting political change.

Jane’s son Frederic Jr. died in 2008. She is survived by her daughter Pamela Bartter, her son Thaddeus Bartter, four grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.

Family and friends will gather to honor and remember Jane for her memorial service on Saturday, Jan. 20, at 11 a.m. in St. Anne’s in-the-Fields Episcopal Church (147 Concord Rd., Lincoln).

Arrangements under the care of Concord Funeral Home, which provided this obituary. To visit Jane’s online guestbook, click here.

Dr. Don Bienfang

There will be a service in Lincoln on January 20 for Dr. Don Bienfang, M.D., Chief of Neuro-Ophthalmology at Brigham and Woman’s Hospital and Associate Professor of Neurology, Harvard Medical School, who died on December 9, 2023 at age 84 after a brief illness.

Born in Elmhurst, Ill., the son of Esther (Kuhlow) and Mark Bienfang, Don was a graduate of York High School’s class of 1956 and went on to complete an undergraduate degree in Mathematics at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana in 1960, and then to Harvard Medical School in 1960. As a medical student, Don worked at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, becoming its first respiratory therapist in 1961, and held a research position in Naples, Italy. Graduating from Harvard Medical School in 1965 and following his internship, fellowship, and residencies that took him to the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Md., and the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Don returned to the Brigham in 1972 and, with his partner Leo T. Chylack Jr., founded the Ophthalmology group, beginning a nearly five-decade-long career at the Brigham.

As a distinguished surgeon and clinician, Don was known for his expertise and depth of knowledge, his warmth, and his wonderfully dry and intellectual sense of humor. Don was a true believer in listening and talking to his patients, often in their native language, to allow the patient to guide the diagnosis. Don felt honored to learn from icons in the field and, in turn, he served the Boston and international communities as a surgeon and teacher of neuro-ophthalmology with dedication and love. Along with the multitude of patients for whom he cared over five decades, Don’s professional legacy lives on in the doctors he mentored, and what is now known as Bienfang’s test for myasthenia gravis, a simple noninvasive test for an autoimmune disease that is difficult to diagnose.

Don met Denise, his wife of 60 years, in 1961, and they were married in 1964, He leaves behind two sons, Matthew Bienfang (Elizabeth) of Hingham and Joshua Bienfang of Bethesda, Md. Don was a devoted husband and a loving father, and he enjoyed and cultivated the ability to send Denise into helpless peals of laughter with his unexpected humor; one of her fondest memories is listening from the bottom of the stairs at their young son’s bedtime while Don gave their stuffed animals personalities and made them talk.

Don and Denise shared an independent-minded approach to life, and in 1974 they moved to Lincoln to embrace the back-to-the-land ethos of the time. In Lincoln, Don built a blacksmith forge, used wood-burning stoves for heat, raised chickens (and a few mean geese), and tended a large garden. Don’s chickens and their homegrown eggs became a feature of the family and community, and tending them served as a meditative evening pastime for him.

Don was not a slave to convention and he enjoyed being that way. In 1985 he slapped on a “Honk if You’re Horny” bumper sticker on his car just to see (until his family made him take it off)… he collected exotic breeds of chickens and unique power tools for his farmstead… he put offbeat cartoons on the insides of the kitchen cabinets for Denise to find… he preferred nonlethal pest control so he built a tunnel to protect the chickens and he kept deer out of his garden with his own scent… he felt a deep love for each of the dogs and at least one of his family’s cats.

He had a wonderful enthusiasm for trying new things, including baking bread, making root beer, motorcycling, playing mandolin, and painting. In the early 1960s in Naples, he developed a taste for espresso, and his sons fondly remember Saturday trips into Boston to watch back-to-back kung fu movies in Chinatown and then to the North End to get a cannoli and an espresso or two.

Don took up running in the late 1970s, and he ran the Boston and New York Marathons multiple times. He was a member of the Harvard Club and the Longfellow Tennis Club, and he enjoyed playing squash and tennis with his friends. He had an unreturnable chip shot that he deployed whenever his children or grandchildren made the mistake of trying to go easy on the old man.

Don and Denise traveled widely together, and later they turned a house on Cape Cod into a gathering point for their family and their large community of friends. Don loved being “Grandpa-Fang” to his grandchildren Micah, Britt, Abby, Caroline, Lily, and Sam. He loved to take them up to the chickens to hunt for eggs or to ride the tractor with him as he mowed the fields in Lincoln.

Relatives and friends are invited to attend the memorial service at 2 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 20, 2024, at the First Parish Church (4 Bedford Road in Lincoln).