Deceased May 10, 2004
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In Memory
Joe Cushing died suddenly on May 10, 2004. For Joe death came without warning—and without pain—from a blockage in his carotid artery that he never knew he had. As shocking as Joe’s death has been for all of us who knew him and loved him, we take some consolation from the fact that he was doing the things he loved right up to the very last minute. Joe had been living with his father, Bob Cushing, from the great Amherst class of 1939, since his mother died two years ago, returning to Middleboro and the house he grew up in. He was in his running clothes and had a pot of coffee brewing for when he returned from a good morning run, a run he never got to take. He had tickets for the Red Sox game that night, where he was going to meet his sons Josh and Jeff and me for a “family” outing he had arranged. It was a beautiful spring morning, at least beautiful by New England standards, and you have to think that he was telling himself that the world was a pretty good place right about then. With Joe’s zest for life and the ever-present twinkle in his eye, I would not want anything other than this kind of upbeat send-off for this great friend and classmate.
Joe loved Amherst and the friends he made there, and he always believed that it had been an incredible privilege for him to be a part of the Amherst community. He was one of a diverse group of people who occupied the fourth floor of James during 1963-64, and he was often the instigator for the late night card games or the times spent sledding on Memorial Hill on our Valentine dinner trays. Probably because of all that “extracurricular” activity, Joe and the College decided that he would benefit from a year off to get his act together in 1964-65. (Joe was the only person I ever knew, then or since, who was on a first-name basis with Dean C. Scott Porter.) But Joe came back in the fall of 1965 and barreled through Amherst without a hiccup after that. He majored in economics, ran cross-country and track and participated in Chi Phi. As one example of the dedication and focus with which Joe approached the things that were important in his life, he trained for and ran in—and completed—the Boston Marathon in the spring of his senior year, fitting all that in at a time when most classmates felt overwhelmed just worrying about passing comps and finding a job. Joe graduated from Amherst in 1968.
After Amherst, Joe went to law school at Boston University. With time out for a stint in Vietnam as a military policeman—a role that his friends found a little ironic given the number of times we successfully evaded the Amherst police during some mischief-making escapade or another—he earned his J.D. in 1973. He then went on to a distinguished career in banking, first with the Massachusetts Co-Operative Bank League and then as executive vice president and finally president of The Co-Operative Bank of Concord (Massachusetts). In 1996, he helped engineer a very successful merger of his bank with U.S. Trust and, after a transition period, retired from banking. Since then he has been practicing law and exploring opportunities to get back into banking.
Joe’s real passions, however, had much less to do with his career than with family and friends. His two sons, Josh and Jeff, and his daughter, Jennifer, are a tribute to the kind of man Joe was. They all spoke eloquently at the funeral about how much their relationship with him had meant to them, about the many things they had learned from him, and about how much they missed him already. Joe had married Pennie, his high school sweetheart, shortly after his graduation from Amherst and, although they had been separated for the last few years, he and Pennie were together in their love of those kids and their pride in what terrific young people they had grown up to be.
Joe was also passionate about Amherst. He served as an associate class agent basically from the time he graduated right up to this year. He played a leadership role in several of our major reunions and was a regular at the joint Class of 1967-Class of 1968 tailgate at Homecoming each year. He never missed an opportunity to go back to “the Fairest College,” and he was always there when his alma mater called on him for help.
I was lucky enough to be able to say a few words about Joe at the funeral in Middleboro on May 13. I talked a bit about how Joe had been my best friend ever since those days together in James Hall and what it had meant to me to have been able to know Joe for more than 40 years. After the ceremony countless people, many with Amherst connections but many I had never met before, came up to me and said that they too had thought of Joe as their best friend and how their stories of his generosity of spirit were even more inspirational than mine. All that made me even more proud to have known him and loved him for all these years. Joe was a special friend to so many of us, Amherst and non-Amherst folks alike, and he will be sorely missed.
Richard R. Spies ’67