The Memorial Wall

It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Ellen Carol Hawkins (Marshall), beloved wife of Victor Cameron Hawkins and loving mother of Jennifer (Colin) and Lesley (Mark) and grandmother to Cameron, Gillian, Callum, and Fiona. She was a loving wife and partner, a caring mother, entertaining grandmother, courageous explorer, nurse, accomplished writer, avid hiker, Scottish country dance teacher, and a leader in all her community activities.

Ellen was raised in New Liskeard, Ontario and after graduating from nursing college in St. Catherines, Ontario, she moved out to Vancouver as her father had said that he had never seen the Rocky Mountains, so she felt that she had to go. There she met a group of English nurses who encouraged her to visit Britain. A year later she set off on a Greyhound bus for Acapulco where she boarded an ocean liner to Southampton, England. After a period in London and Edinburgh, Ellen and her traveling companion Lil then decided to go to Ireland and set off for Glasgow to catch the boat only to find that there were no sailings that day. Her friend Lil remembered that she had a contact in Glasgow through which Ellen met her husband-to-be.

Victor and Ellen had an immediate deep love. Three months later they announced their engagement in December and married in March as he worked for an international company and was being sent to Portugal. This was the beginning of an international adventure living in Switzerland, Chile (where Jennifer was born), Scotland (where Lesley was born), Indonesia, the Philippines, Canada, Chile again, and the USA, after which Victor retired. They moved back to Santiago, Chile where they spent a further 15 years before returning to Canada.

Throughout their many postings Ellen travelled widely. Ellen had the ability to adapt to many different situations always with a smile and a positive attitude. In Bogor, Indonesia many of the basics of living were missing or restricted. She raised their two girls there. Jennifer was three years old and Lesley 18 months old when they arrived. Medical assistance was rudimentary, so Ellen had to rely on her nursing training and good judgement. Ellen set up a school in the spare bedroom and garden for Jennifer and some other expatriate children and taught them for two years. With encouragement from the management of the local Goodyear facility she organized the start-up of a larger school to accommodate the increasing number of expatriate families living in the town. She ran the school and taught during the first year. That school has now grown into a major educational establishment in Bogor.

Ellen impacted every community in which she lived by volunteering for numerous charities and church organizations and led Scottish country dancing groups. During her time in Chile, she formed and led a hiking group, became an accomplished writer, penning Djinxed, a memoir about the family’s adventures in Indonesia, and wrote several anthologies with the Santiago Writers, a writing group which she founded.

Every family experiences death at some point. It is for our family a great sadness as Ellen was the fulcrum of the family. That she died from Parkinson’s disease which slowly destroyed her mind is perhaps the most tragic aspect because she had a fine mind, full of curiosity, humour, and great imagination. She was determined and one of several “pushy Marshall women” in her extended family who was a leader in all her activities. She will be greatly missed, not only by the family, but by many friends across the world.

We thank the wonderful team at Bradford Valley Care Community for their compassionate and loving care during her residence there.

Judith Oppenheimer, an award-winning author, journalist, teacher and great wit, passed away peacefully in her sleep on Wednesday, May 1, in Northwest Baltimore. She was 82.

Judy was born to Jeanne and Ralph Altman at Columbia Women’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20, 1942. She lived on Simms Place in Northeast D.C., a diverse and lively neighborhood, until she was 9, when her parents moved the family to the Northern Virginia suburbs.

In 1959, Judy graduated from Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, Virginia, and majored in American Studies at George Washington University, graduating in 1963.

She then began a long career in journalism, landing a job at The Washington Post as a “copy girl” that led to a Post internship, both positions that generally went in those days to white male graduates of Ivy League schools.

Judy became a reporter at the Post before taking a job at the Philadelphia Daily News in 1966. There, she worked as a film critic and was one of only two women reporters on staff.

Judy met and married Jerry Oppenheimer, an investigative reporter at the Daily News. After their first son, Jesse, was born in 1969, they moved to Washington, D.C., where Jerry got a job with the Evening Star.

Over the years, Judy’s writing for the Village Voice, Washingtonian, the Washington Post Magazine, Salon, The Forward, Moment and other publications earned numerous awards.

As a reporter and senior editor for the Baltimore Jewish Times, she traveled to Argentina to cover the aftermath of the 1994 terrorist attack on a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. She also wrote a cover story about Henrietta Szold when the Jewish Museum of Maryland presented an exhibition of the pioneering Zionist leader’s life and work in April of 1995, as well as a profile of Holocaust survivor, author and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel.

“Judy was truly a journalist’s journalist and a one-of-a-kind human being,” said Jmore Editor-in-Chief Alan Feiler, who worked closely with Oppenheimer at the Jewish Times. “She didn’t mince words and called it like she saw it, but she was a person with a big heart and a love of life and family and people. She also was hysterical and loved to laugh. So many people loved her.”

Judy could turn the most mundane assignment into a lively read. As editor of the Montgomery County Advertiser, she brought sharp and amusing writing to a free suburban newspaper.

Judy’s writing also reflected her profound emotional intelligence. In a tribute to her late cousin, feminist and cultural critic Ellen Willis that appeared on the First of the Month website, she wrote about how important it was for the two of them to sit close to one another:  “I guess it was a way of saying without words, You know how much I’ve always loved you, don’t you? You know how important you’ve always been to me, right? How much I’ll miss you, forever.”

In 1989, Judy’s first book, “Private Demons” (Ballantine), a literary biography of writer Shirley Jackson, received a glowing review in the New York Times Book Review. More than the acclaim, though, Judy said her biggest thrill came from researching and writing the book.

Her second book, “Dreams of Glory” (Summit Books), published in 1991, chronicled a season in her son Toby’s high school football team.

In the late 1990s, Judy entered a master’s program designed for journalists interested in teaching at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she taught four classes per semester while carrying a full course load and earning a 4.0 grade point average. She was a natural teacher who loved working with students.

Judy loved good writing of all kinds and was an ardent advocate of  direct, economic, un-showy prose. With her sharp insights and sharper wit, she was an engaging conversationalist who listened carefully and lived for laughter.

She was devoted to being an extraordinary writer, but more importantly, a wonderful mother, daughter, sister and friend.

Apart from some short interludes in Philadelphia and Baltimore, she lived her entire life in the D.C. area.

Judy is survived by her sons, Jesse and Toby; her grandchildren, Max, Louise and Julien; her sister, Ida; her nephew, Koby; her daughter-in-law, Josee; and a handful of loyal, amazing friends who stuck by her side until the end. 

Judy was predeceased by her parents and sister, Deborah Altman. She will be laid to rest next to Deborah at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.

David Shapiro, a cerebral yet deeply personal poet aligned with the so-called New York School, whose highly lyrical work balanced copious literary allusions with dreamlike imagery and intimate reflections drawn from family life, died on Saturday in the Bronx. He was 77.

His wife, Lindsay Stamm Shapiro, said the cause of his death, in a hospice facility, was Parkinson’s disease.

Mr. Shapiro published 11 volumes of poetry during his six-decade career. His book “You Are The You: Writings and Interviews on Poetry, Art and the New York School” is scheduled to be published this fall. His 1971 collection, “A Man Holding an Acoustic Panel,” was nominated for a National Book Award.

He was also an art historian, producing monographs on Piet Mondrian, Jasper Johns, Jim Dine and other painters. And he maintained a career in academia that included decades as an art history professor at William Paterson University in Wayne, N.J. In the 1970s, he taught English and comparative literature at his alma mater, Columbia University.

It was there as an undergraduate that he first tasted fame, albeit unwittingly, during the landmark student uprising in the spring of 1968, which was sparked by outrage over the university’s ties to research for the Pentagon, its plans to build a gym on nearby public land and other issues.

Mr. Shapiro was just weeks from graduating when another student photographed him when the office of the university’s president, Grayson Kirk, in Low Library was occupied.

Shown seated in a high-backed chair behind the administrator’s paper-strewn desk, Mr. Shapiro captured the spirit of a moment, casually smoking one of Mr. Kirk’s cigars while wearing sunglasses and a defiant smirk.

The photograph ultimately ran in Life magazine and publications around the world. Although it became an enduring symbol of the student protests that roiled universities across the nation in the late 1960s, Mr. Shapiro preferred over the years to focus on his literary achievements, not his cameo as a campus rebel.

Mr. Shapiro was a nimble-minded, voluble and gregarious polymath who demonstrated, in both his life and his work, an almost gymnastic ability to bound between intellectual topics, the writer Lucy Sante, a friend and a former student of Mr. Shapiro’s at Columbia, said in an interview.

“David just thought about 15 times as fast as the average person, and he talked that fast as well,” Ms. Sante said. “Any conversation with David, in or out of the classroom, was a dense weave of references to art and literature and music and science, emitted directly from his subconscious, swerving this way and that and spinning out into epic digressions.”

A literary prodigy, Mr. Shapiro was already publishing poems in European and South African journals by the age of 10. At 14, he published a poem in The Antioch Review, his first in the United States. As a freshman at Columbia in 1965, he published his first poetry collection, “January.”

He was often categorized as part of what became known, starting in the 1950s, as the New York School — an experimental vanguard of visual artists, dancers and poets including John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch, who was also a Columbia professor and mentored Mr. Shapiro as a student.

Mr. Shapiro was considered part of the second generation of the New York School, along with Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Ron Padgett and others.

“Although often described as a member of the New York School of poets, David Shapiro wrote poems that sound like no one else’s,” Mr. Padgett wrote in an email, “poems full of mystery, lyricism, and agile leaps of an eternally fresh spirit, with surprising humor in the music of his unearthly melancholy.”

It is snowing on the kindergarten
It is snowing on your eyelids
Love’s dice
Are manias and fights
Anacreon writes
You are standing on my eyelids

And your hair
Is in my hair
As Paul Eluard
Says elsewhere
And what do you say? I say

Stay stay
stay stay
streak intrinsicality

His work also drew from surrealism and the avant-garde; he employed dramatic shifts in level of diction, or even in subject, within a single poem, as well as taking a literary collage approach, which he discussed in a 1990 interview with Pataphysics magazine.

“I’ve transformed grammar and physics textbooks and played with their degraded diction,” he said. “I’ve taken Heidegger and changed all his words for being into snow.”

In his 1979 poem “A Song,” he added, he took snippets of the 1966 Percy Sledge song “When a Man Loves a Woman” and transformed them into “a disco cascade with elements of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.”

David Joel Shapiro was born on Jan. 2, 1947, in Newark, N.J., the third of four children of Dr. Irving Shapiro, a dermatologist, and Fraida (Chagy) Shapiro, a schoolteacher. He spent summers in Deal, a breezy seaside borough on the Jersey Shore near Asbury Park, which he later invoked in his lauded 1969 collection, “Poems From Deal.”

He left Weequahic High School in Newark after his junior year to enroll in Columbia in 1964, graduating in 1968 with a bachelor’s degree in English and comparative literature. He later received a master’s degree from the University of Cambridge and a doctorate in English from Columbia.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by his sisters, Judith Silverman, Naomi Shapiro and Debra Shapiro, and his son, Daniel Shapiro.

A product of a staunchly left-wing household, Mr. Shapiro at times wove themes of political liberation into his work.

His 1971 poem “The Funeral of Jan Palach” was written from the ghostly perspective of a Czech student who died three days after setting himself on fire in Prague in January 1969, in the turbulent protests against the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia the previous summer:

When I entered the first meditation
I escaped the gravity of the object, I experienced the emptiness,
And I have been dead a long time.

The poem was later inscribed on a haunting memorial to the martyred student in the city by the artist and architect John Hejduk.

But it was a very different political statement that brought Mr. Shapiro international attention: his occupation photo. Mr. Shapiro came to regret the shot, in part because it made him seem like a leader of the protests although he was only a participant.

The photograph also caused him plenty of other problems. “He was clubbed by police and suspended by Columbia — he almost didn’t graduate,” his wife said in an interview. “He had been given a five-year fellowship to Harvard, and that was rescinded. Even going through customs, he was on the F.B.I. lookout list.”

In a 2018 interview with the New Jersey newspaper The Record, Mr. Shapiro issued a mea culpa of sorts. “I’d like to apologize for the rudeness of my youth,” he said. “That’s not a picture. That’s a parody.”

Charles William Lamb, PhD, whose career as a clinical psychologist in Cooperstown spanned over five decades, passed away following a long battle with Parkinson’s disease in the early-morning hours of Monday, April 29, 2024 at Woodside Hall in Cooperstown with family by his side. He was 86.

Born March 29, 1938 in Englewood, New Jersey, Charlie was a son of Charles Lamb and Justine (Clay) Lamb. He spent his early years in Englewood and later in West Winfield, New York, where he learned to love basketball, golf, and the outdoors. Charlie enjoyed spending his summers working as a camp counselor and vacationing in Lake Placid. The family moved to Fremont, Ohio, where he met Lois Ann Deppen. They married in 1957 and together, they started their family. Charlie graduated from Oberlin College in 1963. After earning his PhD in clinical psychology from The Ohio State University in 1966, Charlie became the director of psychology at Columbus State Hospital. From 1968-69, he was an assistant professor of psychology at SUNY Buffalo. In 1969, the family moved to Cooperstown when Charlie became the chief psychologist at Bassett Hospital.

In 1978, Charlie married Barbara Jorgensen. Theirs was a love story for the ages, and he remained devoted to Barbara through his final days. He was an avid boater, and meticulously cared for their wooden boat, Lambcruiser. Together, Barbara and Charlie cruised Otsego Lake, enjoying sunsets, nature, and all creatures great and small. Charlie was passionate about golf and was a regular at Leatherstocking Golf Course, where he took great pleasure in walking the course while joking with his friends. He loved folk music, and enjoyed the sing-alongs at Woodside Hall with Barbara by his side.

After 29 years, Charlie retired from Bassett in 1997 and opened an independent practice in clinical psychology. Charlie retired again in 2018 at the age of 80. An avid reader and writer, Charlie published numerous articles in professional journals. From 1997-2000, he also wrote a weekly column, “Lamb’s Tales,” for “The Freeman’s Journal.”

Charlie is survived by his wife of 45 years, Barbara, of Cooperstown; daughter Susan Lamb and husband Clif Buell of Apalachicola, Florida; son William Lamb and wife Laura Bliss Lamb of Cooperstown; a brother, David (Vickie) Lamb; nieces Tricia (Michael) McElfresh and Lisa (Scott) Stuart; great-nephew Casey McElfresh; and great-nieces Ivy McElfresh, Anya Stuart, and Brynn Stuart, all of Clyde, Ohio. He was predeceased by his parents.

Charlie often spoke of one’s ability to raise or lower the temperature in a room simply by entering it. To all those who lowered the temperature—the expert caregivers at Bassett, the compassionate team at Woodside Hall, the helping hands from Helios Care, and loving family and friends who supported us over the last three months—we are forever grateful.

Leslie and Joel Mark are saddened to announce the passing of Leslie's father, Leonard C. ("Lenny") Joseph, who passed peacefully May 25, 2022, in Rancho Mirage, California, of natural causes after a life well lived of almost 98 years.

Lenny was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1924. During the War, he served in the fabled U.S. Army Tenth Mountain Division ("Climb to Glory") and saw action in Italy toward the end of the combat. Coming home, he migrated to Los Angeles where he met and married the love of his life for 60 years, Norma Handfinger, who passed from Parkinson's Disease in 2009. They lived a loving and full life in Los Angeles until moving to Rancho Mirage in 1980. Throughout his entire adult life, he was a tireless and hard worker, supporting his family and pursuing a long and successful career in the retail market and wholesale meat business, concluding with an individually owned and operated wholesale meat distribution business catering to customers in the Coachella Valley.

In addition to his family, extended family and wide circle of friends, tennis and skiing remained his life-long passions. Literally until his dying breath, each time he looked up at freshly fallen snow on Mt. San Jacinto, he would enthusiastically proclaim: "I still have one more good run in me." And in his mind, of course, he did.

Leonard is survived by his three daughters, Darryl, Leslie and Stacy, and his extended family, including his children, great grandchildren and great-great grandchildren, and Bobbie Weinhart his friend and companion in his later years, all of whom will forever remember and celebrate his life, his warm welcome, his passion for life, his sense of humor, his sense of charity and his many other contributions to their own lives and the lives of so many others that he had touched during his lifetime.