Category: Memorial

Obituary in MR magazine
Obituary in Women’s Wear Daily
Obituary at Nutmeg Cremation Society

Elizabeth Hollister Adam, known to all as Holly, died surrounded by loving family friends on X April, 2024 in New Canaan, Connecticut at the age of 65, of alcohol-related liver disease.

Holly was born March 7, 1959, the younger child of the late Prof. Donald G. Adam of Pittsburgh, PA, an English professor at Chatham College, and of the late Nancy Tuttle Adam, poet and professional photographer of Nantucket, MA. She and her older brother, Oxford lecturer and parish priest in the Church of England, the Revd. Dr. Andrew K. M. Adam, of Abingdon-on-Thames, England, grew up in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh.

Holly developed an early interest in clothing and fashion. While still in high school she was taking buying trips to New York City with the owner of a Pittsburgh boutique where she had an after-school job, and she worked summers in both high school and college selling clothing on Nantucket Island. At Hobart-William Smith College (HWS) she studied English and built a strong community of friends. After graduation, she moved to New York City to workas an assistant fashion editor of Vogue Magazine. In New York she worked at Polo/Ralph Lauren and at Bloomingdale’s where she was the men’s and children’s fashion director, before she established her own clothing and home textiles collection, Holly Adam Home. In 1998, she founded Cashmere Inc in Greenwich Connecticut. She became an expert in cashmere, traveling frequently to Scotland and Italy for design and production collaborations. Holly founded the MensWearNetwork for NYC fashion professionals, while starting up a project management practice, HomeWorks. At home in CT, she expressed her love of food and entertaining through her Shop-Chop-Cook project.

Holly loved and was loved by a wide circle of family and friends, always ready to raise her hand to help or to gather them for lunch at her favorite restaurant. Her precise eye for fashion, her remarkable memory for names and places and attire, and her gift for making and sustaining connections among people made for memorable meet-ups at local Hobart lacrosse games, spontaneous lunch get-togethers, and surprise presents for cousins. She particularly cherished her cooking trips to Italy with her father Don.

She is survived by her devoted friend James Anagnost, and by her loving brother and sister-in-law, the Revd. Dr. Andrew K. M. Adam and Dr. Margaret B. Adam; by her uncle Richard Adam of of Albuquerque, N.M, her aunt Harriet Tuttle Noyes (Robert), of Arlington, MA, as well as a niece and two nephews, a grandniece and a grandnephew, cousins Martitia DeWitt Ornelas (Zuben) of NYC, Adele Racheff (James) of St. Croix, Carol Noyes Hewett (Adam) of Bellingham, WA, James Noyes (Karen) of Aston, PA, Alison Noyes Buchanan (Michael) of Holyoke, MA, Rebecca Gorrell (Gregory) of Crested Butte, CO, and more Noyes, Frost, and Spencer cousins who comprise her large and loving family.

In honor of Holly, memorial contributions may be made to Hobart William Smith or Waveny Hospice.

Donations to Hobart and William Smith in memory of Holly Adam Class of ’81 can be made online or by a check payable to Hobart and William Smith Colleges, mailed to Office of Advancement, 300 Pulteney Street, Geneva NY 14456 Memo: In honor of Holly Adam Class of ’81.

Donations to Palliative & Supportive Care of Nantucket in honor of Holly Adam (and Nancy Adam), in accordance with options on this page.

(from obituary submitted to the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror)

Nancy Tuttle Adam, of Arlington, Massachusetts, and a longtime resident of Nantucket, died on June 20, at the age of 82. The daughter of artists Isabelle and Emerson Tuttle, both founding members of the Artists’ Association of Nantucket, Nancy too was a gifted photographic artist and poet. She exhibited her signature minimalist landscape photography at The Little Gallery and published several volumes of poetry over the course of her life.

Born on March 16, 1935, in New Haven, CT, she was an Island child from the cradle on, summering in the Tuttle family’s historic 1724 house. From her bedroom window perch, she loved to stick her tongue out at passing tour buses as they pointed out her ‘old house’. She was precocious, observant and sensitive to image and language. Nantucket ran deep in her veins and influenced her profoundly.

After attending Radcliffe College in Boston and graduating from Chatham College in Pittsburgh, she worked in a photographic lab in that city from 1978–1984 before moving back full-time to the island. Here she could follow the many passions that made her a Renaissance woman. In addition to writing her own poetry, she contributed to the Isle Say column of the Nantucket Map & Legend for years, commenting with astute and gentle wisdom on Island life. She was an active and formative member of Hospice (now Palliative Care) on Nantucket, an active animal lover, and an enthusiastic member of the Unitarian Church family.

Challenged for most of her adult life with multiple sclerosis, she made illness her companion not her taskmaster. Grace, good humor and a forgiving nature carried her on wings above the disease, even when she was forced to use a wheelchair.

Nancy is survived by her devoted daughter Holly Adam, of Nantucket, her daughter-in-law and son Margaret and Andrew Adam, of Oxford, England, and her sisters Grace Noyes of Nantucket and Harriet (and Bob) Noyes of Arlington and Nantucket. She was predeceased by her sister Isabelle Tuttle DeWitt. She was a loving grandmother to Josiah, Nate and Pippa Adam. Various nieces and cousins complete her large and loving family.

A simple celebration of her life will be held at the Unitarian Church at a future date. Expressions of sympathy may take the form of gifts to Palliative Care of Nantucket.

The Rev. Richard Anderson Bamforth, 86, of 17 Brooklawn Avenue, Augusta, died peacefully, at home, on January 6, 2017.

Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, January 7, 1930, the son of Captain Charles N. Bamforth and Dorothy Anderson Allan, Dick Bamforth grew up in Swampscott where he completed high school in 1947. He majored in French and Classics at Bowdoin College and graduated in 1951. After further study at Middlebury College he taught French, Latin, and Social Studies at Cony High School for one year before enlisting in the U. S. Army during the Korean War. In the Army Security Agency he studied the Russian language in Monterey, California and spent the rest of his tour of duty in communications reconnaissance on the border between the American and Soviet Zones of divided Germany.
Inspired by a German Lutheran pastor who reached out to American GIs, Bamforth shifted his direction and, upon release from the Army, entered Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. He graduated with the degree of Master of Divinity in 1958 and was ordained to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church. He served in two Missouri parishes: Grace Church, Kirkwood, and Holy Cross Church, Poplar Bluff. In 1959, he married Patricia Anne Pennington of Kirkwood. Their two daughters were born in Poplar Bluff.
In 1966 Bamforth was called as Rector of St. Mary’s Church, Rockport, Massachusetts where he served until 1992. Forever a student of language and literature, he took many evening courses at Harvard and, in 1982, earned an additional master’s degree from Boston University in the Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages. While ministering in Rockport, he tutored numerous refugees and foreign students in English and taught courses in Russian language and culture in the continuing education program of North Shore Community College.
Bamforth retired from full-time parish ministry in 1992 and moved with his wife, Pat, to Augusta. For nine years he was a regular substitute teacher at Cony High School, served as Interim Rector of St. Mark’s Church, Augusta, from 1993 to 1994, and was for 20 years a frequent supply priest in many Maine parishes. More recently he served as Assisting Priest at St. Mark’s. His book reviews and articles have appeared in several church periodicals and, with his brother, he co-edited the autobiographical journals of their sea-going father, Iron Jaw, A Skipper Tells His Story, published in 2002.

An avid gardener and photographer, Bamforth enjoyed his kayak and canoe at “Someplace Else,” his summer camp on Damariscotta Lake. Dick and Pat enjoyed traveling in Great Britain, where he sought out English and Scottish relatives, and in Russia, where he twice visited seminaries of the Orthodox Church. A spiritual director and small group Bible Study leader, he also did tutoring in the Russian language. In recent years, he taught a variety of courses in the UMA Senior College, focusing on literature, art, history, and religion.
In Maine, he served on several diocesan committees and was a member of both Veterans for Peace and the Episcopal Peace Fellowship.
Bamforth delighted in the nicknames others gave him. His grandchildren call him “Pa Moose,” high schoolers called him “Abe Lincoln” or “Colonel Sanders,” and parishioners often called him “Father Bam-Bam.” In addition to the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer he considered both Celtic and Russian Orthodox spirituality, together with the classical Anglican theologians, to be great resources for his faith and life.
Bamforth is survived by his wife, Patricia of Augusta; daughter Jeanne Bamforth of Topsham; daughter Margaret and her husband Andrew K. M. Adam of Oxford, England; three grandchildren: Nathaniel Adam and his wife Laura of New Haven, CT, Josiah Harris-Adam and his wife Laura of Watertown, MA, and Philippa Adam of Bristol, ME; sister-in-law Janice Bamforth of Belmont, VT; niece Judith Jervis of Danville, N.H.; and nephew Charles H. Bamforth of Kingston, N.H.
A memorial Eucharist was celebrated at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 9 Summer Street, Augusta on Saturday, Jan. 14, at 1:30pm, followed by a public reception. Interment of ashes will follow at a later date in Forest Grove Cemetery.
In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions are invited for St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 209 Eastern Ave., Augusta, ME 04330.
Arrangements are by Plummer Funeral Home, Augusta.

Richard Bamforth Obituary from the Poplar Bluff Daily American Republic

Today’s my father’s birthday; he would be 80 today. This afternoon I bumped into a couple of ‘Net essays about parents and children and ageing and death, and only just now did I figure out why I was so teary and reflective.

Dad taught English Lit (among other things) at Chatham College. He loved bringing students to England and showing them the places so many of his heroes, and theirs, walked and talked, drank coffee, drank wine and ale, and wrote. He was a great teacher.

This evening I’ll head out to the High Street to meet up with some students and former students at the Mitre. I know Dad had visited Oxford — I’m not sure whether it was a regular stop on his student tours — I know he’d been here because on one of his first trips, he brought back a yellow Oxford University t-shirt for me. I wore it through college, I wore it for years after, and it may well be in a storage bin in an upstairs closet right now. He wasn’t a perfect dad, and I was by no means an ideal son. I’m a teacher too, though I’ve come to terms with the fact (amplified by observing what an excellent teacher Margaret is) that I won’t ever be as good at it as he was. But I’ll have a pint, maybe more, and I’ll give thanks for him and his imparting to me his love of teaching and learning, and I’ll try not to embarrass my students by weeping at how he taught me to care about them, and how much I do.

Thanks, Dad.

Last Friday night, a friend of mine from more than ten years ago died. Jamie had been undergoing a series of surgeries to treat his heart. He had begun the process with confidence and bluster that we would have expected of him, and came back after his first treatment with determination to resume life full speed ahead; but a second surgery was required, there were complications, and quite unexpectedly Jamie Mitchell of Goulburn, New South Wales, died as a result.

I knew Jamie as Dargarian, the mercurial, boisterous, impatient, utterly determined lead warrior — our “tank” — in the World of Warcraft guild that Joi Ito founded, of which I was an admin. Very often I was Darg’s healer; he would yell “BIG HEALS” into the guild’s shared audio channel when a monster was raining down damage on him, and on those occasions when I did not successfully keep up a stream of healing equal to the damage he sustained (sometimes through random mischance, sometimes through my own slowness, sometimes because Darg would keep moving forward and I’d lose sight of him) he would shout “Tank down!” and sometimes suggest that we start the attack over again as soon as his character died. “Tank down, it’s a wipe” he would say, and we would point out that thirty-nine of us remained who might possibly be able to finish a particular event without his participation. I loved healing Darg, even though he sometimes cursed me out for not doing a good enough job; that’s what we want in a tank, a sort of swash-buckling, irrepressible enthusiasm for the job he has to do, and though I healed many excellent tanks before and after Darg, none were as colourful, as manic, as mad for the struggle as he was.

Eventually the close-knit raiding group from our guild changed direction, changed characters, changed times and emphases. Darg — who, after all, was devoting his Australian midnight morning and daybreak mornings to our raids — took less part in both the group raiding and in the guild as a whole. He’d pop up now and then, we might run a lesser dungeon crawl with him, but the mad glory of the huge 40-member raids ebbed away.

We kept in touch through the Guild forums, through Facebook, and in the years after our guild conquered its first big raiding challenge, Jamie went on to marry and have a fine son; we’d see photos on Facebook and imagine Darg as a Dad. He must have mellowed over time, but not too much. I’ll invite Giselle to leave her own comments — but we know dozens of comrades-in-arms who will remember Dargarian, will remember Jamie, as an unstoppable force (for better or, sometimes, for worse) with a big heart, comrades who will miss hearing him explode into the guild audio channel, who have been sending him big heals, big heals, and who have been greatly saddened this past weekend to hear that the tank is down. For now, it’s a wipe.

Major Richard Thorburn Herzog (ret.), Ph.D., died back in January; I just heard about it from a round-robin email that some of our classmates from Bowdoin were circulating. Zog was one of the legendary figures of the fraternity to which we both belonged at Bowdoin College, the now-defunct Alpha Rho Upsilon (founded with Greek initials to correspond to “All Races United”) (we were PC before PC was a label).
 
Zog didn’t leave much of a trace on the Web, so I’m tracing his name on the wet concrete of my blog, here. Maybe someone will come across it and leave a reminiscence, or just remember him fondly, or wish they did. In the years since we graduated, Zog found a home in the Episcopal Church; speaking as a friend and as a priest, I offer the words from the prayerbook:

He that raised up Jesus from the dead will also give life to our mortal bodies, by his Spirit that dwelleth in us.
 
In the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God our brother Richard…. The Lord bless him and keep him, the Lord make his face to shine upon him and be gracious unto him, the Lord lift up his countenance upon him and grant him peace.

And speaking as a drinking buddy, I will lift a glass to Zog, to Charles Paisley, to the hockey teams of the U.S. Olmpic Team 1976 and of Bowdoin College, and to friends absent and ever-present.

Obituary from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Obituary from the Sunday Post-Gazette
Obituary from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Obituary from Chatham College
 

 
Donald G. Adam, Professor Emeritus of English Literature at Chatham College, died early Wednesday morning, April 2, at UPMC Shadyside Hospital. He had been hospitalized for treatment of pulmonary fibrosis.
 
Dr. Adam was born in Cleveland in 1935, the eldest child of Malcolm G. Adam and Lois Lane Adam. The family — now including younger brother Richard — subsequently moved to Birmingham, Michigan, where the boys graduated from Birmingham High School. Donald graduated from Birmingham High School in 1953, receiving several academic honors.
 
He attended Harvard College from 1953-1956 and 1958-59, receiving an A.B. in English in 1959. While at Harvard, he became involved with the Cambridge theater community, in connection with which he met Nancy Jackson Tuttle of Radcliffe College, whom he married in January 1957. Their son Andrew was born later that year, and their daughter Elizabeth Hollister (Holly) Adam in 1959.
 
After participating in the Bread Loaf School of English in 1959 and teaching at the Dutchess School (1958-59), he enrolled in the doctoral program at the University of Rochester, where he studied English literature. He served as a part-time lecturer in English at Rochester between 1961 and 1963, and he assisted with editorial responsibilities for William Gilman’s edition of the Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson (with special responsibility for Greek and Latin references). He also began his work with the Essential Articles series, in which he assisted with the preparation of volumes on English Augustan Backgrounds (1962), Alexander Pope (1964; rev. ed. 1968), John Dryden (1966), Old English Poetry (1967), and Francis Bacon (1969). He was awarded honors as a University Scholar from 1959 to 1962, and as a University Fellow from 1960 to 1962. He graduated from the University of Rochester in 1963 with a Ph.D. in English, for a dissertation entitled “John Dryden’s Prose Achievement.”
 
Dr. Adam and his family next moved to Brunswick, Maine, where he held positions as Instructor, then Assistant Professor of English at Bowdoin College.
 
After three years in Maine, Dr. Adam was offered a position at Chatham College in Pittsburgh, where he began teaching in 1966 as Assistant Professor of English and retired in 2002 at the rank of Professor. During his thirty-six years at Chatham, he held the Buhl Professorship in 1974-75, 1987-88, and 2001-2002; he chaired the English Department from 1975 to 1980, and the Communications Program from 1973 to 1975. He served Chatham in innumerable administrative capacities (from tireless recruiting to leadership of the Promotions and Tenure Committee), but was especially known for his work as a teacher and mentor. He offered courses on Composition, on The Rise of the Novel, on Comedy, on Shakespeare, on architecture, on computers, and on dozens of other topics.
 
In the late seventies, he and Nancy Adam were divorced. In 1979, he married Cecilia Sommers, then station manager of WQED FM, bringing into his life her children Christopher O’Riley, Virgina O’Riley, Murphy O’Riley, and Matthew O’Riley. During these years, Dr. Adam curated the Pittsburgh appearance of the “Shakespeare: The Globe and the World” exhibition that presaged the resurgence of interest in Shakespeare in the 1980’s and 90’s. He worked as a script editor on the Once Upon A Classic series production of “The Leatherstocking Tales.” He appeared occasionally on WQED FM and TV, contributed articles to Pittsburgh magazine, and edited and introduced the book of photographs by Lynne Johnson and Joel Levinson, Pittsburgh Moments.
 
In the late eighties, Dr. Adam and Ms. Sommers divorced. Dr. Adam continued his active teaching, placing particular emphasis on leading courses that culminated in travel, leading groups of students to drama festivals in Canada and England, and developing a well-known walking tour of literary London.
 
In 1993, on one of his tours of England, Dr. Adam met Susan Hamilton, in whose company he found particular delight. They found a home together, where they gardened, cooked, and kept an eye on Pittsburgh sports and arts activities. He retired from full-time teaching at Chatham in 2002, but continued to teach as an adjunct instructor.

Chatham professor ‘was bigger than life’

By Bill Zlatos
TRIBUNE-REVIEW

Donald G. Adam taught about 30 different courses in his 42 years at Chatham University — everything from English literature to computers.
“He was bigger than life,” said a colleague, Tom Hershberger, former vice president of Chatham and now a professor of psychology there. “He was inspiring. He had a broad range of knowledge and interests.”

Mr. Adam of Point Breeze died Wednesday, April 2, 2008, of pulmonary fibrosis at UPMC Shadyside. He was 72.

Mr. Adam was born in Cleveland and moved to Detroit. He received a bachelor’s degree in English from Harvard University and a doctorate in English from the University of Rochester in New York.

He arrived at what was then Chatham College in 1966 and retired as faculty emeritus in 2002 but continued to teach as an adjunct professor. He especially enjoyed teaching Japanese students English.
“He not only taught English literature; he also taught people how to think about literature and life,” Hershberger said.

Mr. Adam led trips abroad, especially to England, where he met his future companion, Susan Hamilton, in 1993.

“He liked to cook,” said Hamilton, 63, of Point Breeze. “He liked to read and do crossword puzzles and grouch about the world of politics.”

He was such an avid Italian chef that he once accompanied his daughter, Holly, of Greenwich, Conn., on a cooking trip to Tuscany.

In addition to his companion and daughter, survivors include a son, A K M Adam of Princeton, N.J.; a brother, Richard, of Albuquerque, N.M.; and a stepsister, Carol Clark of Amherst, Mass.

The Burton L. Hirsch Funeral Home in Squirrel Hill is handling the arrangements.

The funeral will be private. A memorial service is being planned.