Deceased June 18, 2023
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IN MEMORY
Fred was born in White Plains, N.Y., and raised in Scarsdale, N.Y., and Indianapolis (a Park School graduate), and moved often in his career, but his roots were firmly Down East coastal Maine. His father was from Portland and a loyal University of Maine graduate, and his mother maintained her 1878 family home for summers in Sargentville, an unincorporated village named for her family.
At Amherst, Fred was an English major. Active with the Christian Association, Debating Council and Student newspaper, he was commodore of the Sailing Club and joined Beta. He received his ’54 MBA from Harvard.
Fred’s career focused on precision metalworking, increasing in complexity from hand tools in every hardware store to thin-wall stainless steel investment castings and bearing assemblies for jet engine and automotive components. As VP of international sales and marketing, he became comfortable with Brazilian, Dutch, English and German cultures.
Fred married Ginnie Hardt in 1959, the year she graduated from Wellesley. By the time they attended our 30th Reunion, Ginny had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in Holland, where they lived for five years while raising three children. She died in 1998 in Maine, where she and Fred had met and married.
For our 50th Reunion, Fred wrote classmates a straightforward explanation that, as Ginnie’s situation became more acute, he realized his sexual orientation was by no means fixed. This was a huge challenge with which he was now comfortable and that his family and close friends had accepted. On retiring in 2000, he and Jim Caggiano set up their home, named Sine Nomine (a subtle reference to a notably uplifting hymn, “For All the Saints”), on Fred’s family land on Eggemoggin Reach, directly across a channel from Sargentville, the perfect summer setting for six grandchildren. Fred died peacefully on June 18, 2023.
Nick Evans ’52