Table of Contents
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Last week, we remembered Marbleheaders who built and ran the town's institutions and physical landscape. This week: the teachers, artists, musicians and neighbors whose work was measured in smaller moments — the classroom, the concert hall, the garden, the conversation on the corner.
These were people whose presence you felt in how Marblehead worked from day to day, not in buildings or budgets, but in how it felt to live here.
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Susan Lucas Riess spent decades in Marblehead classrooms, first in the elementary schools and later at Marblehead High School.
She began by teaching third grade and later moved up to the high school, where she taught English and creative writing until she retired in 1998.
Inside the schools, she also took on the work that keeps a faculty running: She served as president of the Teachers' Association, stayed close to fellow educators and kept writing in her own time through workshops.
Years later, she came back to Marblehead and settled into town life again, tutoring ESL students and building a small, close circle on Powder House Court, including her neighbor, Jackie Oldham.
She died Sept. 12 at age 86, two days before her 87th birthday.
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Peter Kent Vail was raised and educated in Marblehead, coming up through the town's schools and graduating from Marblehead High School in 1964.
He carried that classroom start into a long working life in education, spending more than 37 years teaching social studies in the Danvers public schools. He taught world history, geography and cultures with energy, and he put as much work into knowing his students as he did into the material.
He was also the parent on the sideline and on the field, coaching his children in baseball and soccer with a patient kind of encouragement. He followed the Red Sox and the Patriots, and he kept showing up for family life in the ordinary ways.
He died Oct. 10 at age 79.
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Mary Bowes Murphy came to Marblehead for the water. She grew up in South Boston, but her love of sailing and the ocean drew her here, and she lived in town from the early 1970s on.
She spent most of her working life in Marblehead Public Schools, teaching elementary students — primarily at the Coffin School — and she liked the long tail of the job: running into former students years later, now grown, sometimes with kids of their own.
After retiring from teaching, she worked at Brass 'N Bounty and volunteered at Abbot Public Library, moving from the classroom into the quieter, steady rhythms of town life.
She gardened with pride, keeping the kind of yard people notice. Friends also remembered her in the ordinary, Marblehead way — out in a snowstorm on Front Street, stopping to talk, calling it beautiful.
She had her own local circuit: the Driftwood, the Barnacle, the Landing, the Muffin Shop.
She died Aug. 19 at age 79.
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If this end-of-year reflection helps you pause and notice the neighbors who quietly sustained boards, committees and local efforts, that’s the kind of civic record The Independent exists to keep. You’re able to read this because 69 Marbleheaders support this work with monthly or annual contributions. Our newsroom runs on about $80,000 a year, with roughly 95% going directly into journalism. Joining today helps us reach 100 members by year’s end and continue this work into the year ahead. 🟦 Click here to become an Independent member
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Judith "Judy" Ross grew up in Marblehead at a time when a high school music room could still feel like the center of a life. She graduated from Marblehead High School in 1959, the same year she was awarded the Paderewski Gold Medal in Piano.
She went on to build a long working life in music — teaching and shaping how other people heard it. At Longy School of Music in Cambridge, she taught for 37 years, leading students through harmony, solfège, counterpoint and graduate seminars, and later chaired the Theory Department.
Outside the classroom, she founded and directed the Massachusetts Harp Ensemble, and she kept playing — serving as principal harpist for community orchestras and wind ensembles. In a private studio, she taught harp, piano and theory to students at every level, and she counted more than 5,000 over her lifetime.
On the North Shore, her name still turned up the way musicians' names do — in programs and lineups, tied to the work.
She died Sept. 27 at age 83.
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James "Jim" Francis Morgan lived a life organized around sound and service — music practiced daily, offered publicly and carried from place to place.
He trained seriously, graduating from Bishop Hendricken High School and the New England Conservatory of Music, then moving to England in 1972 for graduate work.
For more than 50 years, he served as an organist across denominations, and at the time of his death he was director of music at Greenwood Community Church Presbyterian. He was proudest, the obituary says, of his years as organist and choirmaster at Grace Episcopal Church in Providence.
Outside the sanctuary, he kept other roles that required the same focus: he played bassoon with the Rhode Island Philharmonic, and he was also a licensed pilot and flight instructor.
He died Sept. 14 at 76.
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Andrea L. Alukonis's work appeared locally in Marblehead — sculptures and paintings shown here alongside the larger circuits of Boston, New York and European galleries. She made art that belonged in public view, where neighbors could meet it without ceremony.
She trained at Lynn Classical High School and the Museum School at Tufts University, then lived as a working artist and a teacher. Late into her life, she was still teaching — including abstract art classes as recently as 2024.
In town life, her presence was often the kind you noticed through routines: work hung for a local show, a conversation that turned quickly to materials and form, a teacher's steady way of looking.
She died July 10 at age 85.
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Jennifer Martelli wasn't born in Marblehead, but for more than two decades she moved at the center of its literary life — reading in seaside salons, listening to fledgling poets, judging the town's Festival of Arts literary contests.
She also wrote about Marblehead with clear eyes. In a 2016 interview, when Doug Holder asked if parts of the town were working class, she said yes — and pushed back on the idea that Marblehead was only the Neck: "It's just, it's very regular … people don't drive down my street to go look at the houses."
That tension — between the blue-collar place she came from and the affluent coastal town she lived in — became one of her subjects. In "The Uncanny Valley" in 2016, she set Marblehead's everyday scenes alongside development and disruption: a smart car, a turtle crossing a narrow road, construction crews "blow up little by little every day at noon."
The coastline was her constant. She told Holder she had always lived by a beach: "I grew up on Revere Beach. I live in Marblehead. There's a beach there."
She died Sept. 25 at age 63.
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Leslie Stucke moved through the world quietly but left beauty behind her. She worked as a nurse at Salem Hospital and was known for her calm presence in hard moments. Outside of work, she created spaces that felt welcoming — her home, her gardens, her table. She made jewelry by hand, tended flowers with care and loved a good meal shared with friends.
She lived in Marblehead for 40 years, most of it in the same house. She walked, volunteered, helped others when they needed it. She didn't chase titles or recognition. She made a life that held people — gently, generously, without needing to be seen.
She died Oct. 28 at age 66.
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Robin J. Foudray moved through Marblehead the way some people do — slowly, sociably, stopping often enough that a simple walk turned into a string of conversations. "It was time consuming to take a walk in Marblehead with Robin," her obituary notes, because she would stop at every corner to talk to a friend or make a new one.
While raising two sons in town, she leaned into the local arts world as a jewelry maker and photographer. She became an active member of the Marblehead Arts Association and volunteered with the Marblehead Festival of Arts Culinary Event Committee.
Her Marblehead life also included Temple Emanu-El, another of the town's steady gathering places — the kind that holds people through years without needing a spotlight.
She died Nov. 19 at 70.
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Karen Draper walked five miles a day for most of her adult life. She started early — sometimes before dawn — and kept the habit through chemotherapy. She walked with friends, with her Goldendoodle, Mollie, and often alone, looping the trails around Marblehead and Salem.
She spent two decades in the sky as a flight attendant for Eastern Airlines, then found a second career in retail, where her style and warmth made her a natural. She taught Sunday School at Old North Church, played tennis and pickleball and never missed a chance to move.
She died Oct. 7 at age 78.
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Valerie (Abdou) Wyckoff made her home in Marblehead and became an active member of St. Michael's Church, settling into a town life built around friends, learning and showing up.
She kept making things. After discovering ceramics in the early 1960s, clay stayed her main creative outlet through adulthood, connecting her to the kind of steady practice that doesn't need an audience.
Her days also ran on places where people gather: open rehearsals at the Boston Symphony Orchestra, church circles, walking groups, book club, conversation group and the long list of women's friendships named in her obituary — St. Catherine's Guild, RH Trail Hikers, Clay School friends, Cottage Garden Club and more.
She died June 24 at age 88.
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Marjorie Roberts moved to Marblehead in 1969, fell for the coastal town quickly and soon bought a 289-year-old pre-colonial home in Old Town — the kind of place that makes you learn the creaks and seasons of a neighborhood.
With no boating experience, she and her husband bought a sailboat and began making trips out to Marblehead's harbor islands. The boat turned into a long-running social engine — years of swimming, boating and friendships that held over five decades.
On land, her Marblehead life showed up in the smaller, steadier ways: tending a garden, cooking for people and "orchestrating neighborhood gatherings," as the obituary puts it — the kind of hosting that makes a street feel like a place you can knock on a door.
Even her rituals were local and lived-in. She made laurel wreath crowns that became fixtures at Christmas, birthdays and poetry readings — something handmade that traveled from room to room and returned each year.
She died Sept. 21 at age 81.
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Anne (Hammond) Khatchadurian was, by the obituary's own phrase, "a true Marblehead townie" — born and raised in town, a Marblehead High School graduate who never quite stopped being of the Shipyard, even when life took her elsewhere.
She served on the Shipyard Association board, kept close to the harbor and moved through town in the everyday ways that add up to being known — garden work, yard sales, golf, the small routines that made Marblehead feel like home.
She retired from the town of Marblehead in 2004, on the day she turned 65, then split her years as a snowbird between Marblehead and Fort Myers Beach — spring training games, warm-weather golf and rides in her yellow VW Cabriolet.
She died Dec. 12 at 86.
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Kenneth Stuart MacAskill was born at the Franklin Street Mary Alley Hospital, raised in Marblehead and stayed tied to town life across his whole span — from Marblehead High School, class of 1953, to the routines he kept in later years.
After time in the U.S. Coast Guard and years of accounting and sales work, he returned to New England in 1970 and settled back into the habits that made him a known face locally: nights at the Gerry, cribbage at the Senior Center and poker whenever a game came together.
He also put time into the town's civic and fraternal infrastructure. He served as treasurer for Marblehead Citizens for Fiscal Responsibility and was active in the Philanthropic Lodge in Marblehead, along with other Masonic bodies, and held memberships that kept him circulating — the Gerry 5 and the Elks Lodge in Gloucester.
For decades, he kept showing up in the stands. He attended Marblehead High School hockey and football games from 1971 until his death, and he talked about the runs he got to witness — the 2021 football state championship and hockey championships in 2011 and 2024.
He died Nov. 24 at age 90.
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Frederick W. Jackson moved to Marblehead in 1960 and stayed, building a life that ran on work, cars and the water.
He worked for General Electric in Lynn, but he also took on Marblehead work that matched his interests more closely. He managed the Auto Dynamics Formula One company in Marblehead, then later founded Orbit Plastics, carrying that builder's instinct into his own operation.
His town life had a clear anchoring point: Eastern Yacht Club. He and his wife joined in 1965, bought a sailboat named Slipstream and spent summers on the water with their kids and close friends — the kind of repeating season that becomes a family calendar.
He kept a long affection for classic cars through the North Shore Old Car Club, but he also liked what was new, becoming one of the first in Marblehead to drive a hybrid and later an all-electric car.
He died Sept. 18 at age 92.
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Donald G. Polich lived in Marblehead in the way people do when the town is not just an address but a base camp — for family time, for friends, for long days on the water.
He was an engineer by training and a builder by temperament. After moving to Massachusetts for work, he founded three electronic manufacturing companies over two decades, and he kept his focus on the people doing the work — pushing continuing education and creating opportunities for veterans with disabilities.
In Marblehead, the clearest picture is the one that repeats: the boat, the cooler, the early start. He loved taking friends and family deep-sea fishing for tuna, fluke and stripers, hoping to catch enough to cover the day's fuel. He was the first one awake, packing sandwiches for everyone, setting the tone before the harbor even fully opened up.
When he wasn't on the water, he kept moving — golf, tennis and a kitchen routine that ended in a tall stack of pancakes with "all the fixings," the kind of thing people remember because it happened again and again.
He died Aug. 2 at age 90.
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James Cook Ayer came to Marblehead in 1979 for the same reason a lot of people do — the sailing — and he stayed long enough to become one of those steady presences with a niche you could point to.
He turned his puzzle obsession into something visible and local: a small business making wooden jigsaw puzzles, produced with water-jet technology and computer software. Some people remembered the sign shaped like a puzzle piece that read, "This business keeps puzzling hours."
He also showed up in Marblehead's institutional life in plain ways. He served for many years on the Eastern Yacht Club race committee, and he sang in the choir at St. Michael's Church.
His hospitality had addresses. He liked gourmet cooking and dinner parties — first on Chestnut Street in Salem, then on Ballast Lane in Marblehead — with friends gathered around food, wine and whatever he was excited about next, including orchids.
He died Aug. 12 at age 91.
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William J. Hamilton III, a Marblehead resident, liked politics the way some people like sports — direct, argumentative and ongoing. The obituary describes him as someone who enjoyed "spirited conversations across party lines," including a long friendship with Democrat George McGovern that began in the early 1990s.
He served in the U.S. Marine Corps and spent two years in Vietnam with the 1st Marine Air Wing, Marine Air Group-16.
He died Sept. 12 at age 81.
Editor’s note: This is not a complete list of Marblehead’s 2025 losses — including many people we’re aware of — but a reported record drawn from publicly documented obituaries and verifiable community roles. If someone you loved died in 2025 and you believe they belong in this remembrance, send their name, a link to an obituary or public notice, and their Marblehead connection — along with a brief note about how they lived their life and impacted others, in small and large ways — to wdowd@marbleheadindependent.com. If we receive enough verified submissions, we’ll publish a Part 3 drawn from community recommendations.
