CapeCodToday Obituaries

Provincetown native, former police chief James Meads Sr. dies at 78

Served as Provincetown Police Chief for 22 years

James J.Meads Sr. 78, of Provincetown died after a very brief illness, Christmas night at his home, surrounded by his loving family. He is the husband of Patricia (Carroll) Meads.

Born in Provincetown he was the son of the late Frank and Mary (Veara) Meads. He was a graduate of Provincetown high school, class of 1951. He was a well known Provincetown native. He became a Provincetown police officer in 1960 and after 10 years on the department he became police chief, a position he held for 22 years until his retirement in 1992. During the 1950s he served in the Navy. For most of his life, he served the people of Provincetown in various capacities through his Church and community organizations.

He was a member of the Knights of Columbus, Walter Welsh Council #2746 in Provincetown, president and financial secretary of St. Peters Club, and a member of the St. Vincent De Paul society in Provincetown. For 42 years he has served as CEO of Lower Cape Ambulance and he also served on the Board of Directors of Seamen's Bank of Provincetown and was a former member of the Provincetown Lions Club.

Besides his wife he is survived by his 2 sons, James J. Meads Jr. and his partner Sandy Silva of Truro and Michael Meads and his wife Lori also Truro and his beloved granddaughter Emily Meads of Truro, and his brother Francis Meads and his wife Ruth of Provincetown. He is predeceased by his first wife Brenda (Dickey) Meads who died in 2004 and his brother Bobby Meads who died 10 months ago.

Relatives and friends are invited to his Funeral Mass which will be celebrated in St. Peter the Apostle Church 11 Prince St. Provincetown on Friday December 30, 2011 at 10:00am. In keeping with his request, there are no visiting hours and burial will be private. If desired memorial contributions in his honor may be made to the Lower Cape Ambulance PO Box 1721 Provincetown, MA 02657 or to St. Vincent De Paul Society c/o St. Peter Church 11 Prince St. Provincetown, MA 02657.

Courtesy of Gately McHoul Funeral Home, 94 Harry Kemp Way, Provincetown.

Sherry Rae Kochka of Brewster, dies at 52

Native Cape Codder, served as church greeter, Sunday school teacher

Sherry Rae Kochka, 52 passed away on July 11, 2011.  Sherry was born in Hyannis, MA to Donald Kochka, Sr., and Mary Ann (Salles), both of Brewster, MA.   Sherry graduated from Nauset Regional High School in 1977; she worked at Marshalls in Dennis for over 10 years.  She was very involved with her church, Grace Chapel Assembly of God, in Wellfleet, MA; where she served as a greeter and a Sunday School Teacher. 

She will be remembered for her warm and inviting smile.

Besides her parents, she is survived by her sisters: Cyndi Collar and Denise Jones and her brother, Donald Kochka, Jr.; nieces, Brianna, Michaela and Ketryn and her nephew Nicholas.

In lieu of flowers, donations in her name can be made to The Masonic Angel Foundation Inc., Box 1389, Orleans, MA 02653.

A Celebration of Life will be held at Grace Chapel, Rte 6 Wellfleet, MA on July 15, 2011 at 7:00 pm.

Nickerson Funeral Home, 77 Eldredge Park Way, Orleans, MA, 508-255-0259.

Drunk driver takes the life of 16-year-old Jack McClelland Pearsall of East Falmouth

Teen's life cut short after being  struck by drunk driver

"More than the average teenage boy or even most grown men"

   Photos courtesy of the Pearsall family.

Jack McClelland Pearsall, 16, passed away tragically at Massachusetts General Hospital on July 4 due to injuries he sustained after being hit by a drunk driver after leaving the Mashpee fireworks display.

In his too-short life Jack was able to take on many roles and be many things, more than the average teenage boy or even most grown men. Of course, he was a soccer aficionado, player, teammate, coach, and referee and touched many lives through his enthusiasm for the sport that everyone loved watching him so passionately and fearlessly play since he was four. He was also a farmer, a fisherman, a landscaper, a salesman, a comedian, a mechanic, a carpenter, a sailor, an engineer, and the list goes on. Above all, “Rabbit” was a twin brother, a little brother, a son, a cousin, a nephew, a grandson, a soon-to-be-brother-in-law, and a friend who will always be missed and thought of fondly for his incredible sense of humor, big heart, “that” dimpled smile and his ability to make anyone smile, and his willingness to live life courageously and without any fear. His life ended just as bravely.

Jack is now with his Pop and Papa Ted and many other amazing family and friends up in Heaven. But here he sadly leaves behind his parents, Kelly and Alvah Pearsall; oldest brother, Alvah, Jr.; older sister, Samantha; twin brother, Charlie; soon-to-be-brother-in-law, Mike Mueller; two grandmothers, Joyce Wiltse and Ada Pearsall; his aunt, Lori Conboy and her husband Mike; his cousins, Michael and Jonathan Conboy; and many other aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends.

The Pearsall family sincerely thanks all the first responders from the Mashpee Fire and Rescue Department, Mashpee Police Department, Boston MedFlight, and the countless wonderful, compassionate physicians, nurses, and staff at MGH who worked tirelessly for Jack.

A celebration of Jack’s life will take place Friday, July 15 at 5 pm at Trotting Park, one of his very favorite places to be. All are welcome. A memorial fund has been set up through the Falmouth Soccer Club. In lieu of flowers, donations may be sent to the Jack Pearsall Memorial Fund, 26 Paddock Circle, East Falmouth, MA 02536.

Naturalist, author, conservationist John Hay, dies at 95

 Cape Cod's greatest nature writer, grandson of Lincoln's secretary

John Hay in 1954, dismantling the tent that had served as the first Cape Cod Museum of Natural History which he founded and headed for 25 years. Photo: Grace McCandless.

John Hay founded Cape Cod Museum of Natural History, wrote over a dozen books

John Hay died Saturday, February 26, at his home on the shore of Muscongus Bay in Bremen in mid-coast Maine, a tiny town much like his nature Brewster was a century ago.

In all, John Hay wrote 18 books. His first, The Run, was published in 1959 and his last, Mind the gap , in 2004.

In addition to being a writer and naturalist, John Hay, 1915-2011, was an early and significant conservationist both here and in Maine where he spent each summer. He was the key founder of the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History in 1954 and its president for 25 years.

Later, as one of the early presidents of the Brewster Conservation Committee, he was largely responsible for convincing the town to set aside vast stretches of salt marsh off Cape Cod Bay as conservation land along Route 6A.

He once said that in the summer, when the population of Brewster swells creating what he has called "a kind of crowded loneliness," John and his wife Kristi, who died in 2007, leave for their home in Maine. There most days he writes in the old barn, but leaves a window open for the swallows while he writes in an old horse stall.

John was born in Ipswich MA in 1915 and raised in New York City where his father, Clarence Hay, was an archeologist at the American Museum of Natural History, Hay spent his summers on his grandfather's farm along Lake Sunapee in New Hampshire.

His many honors

His many honors include selection as Phi Beta Kappa poet at Harvard in 1963, and the John Burroughs Medal in 1964, garnered for his book The Great Beach.

In 1970 he was named conservationist of the year by the Massachusetts Wildlife Federation, and in 1991, the Orion Society established the John Hay Award, given annually to an author who excels in addressing the relationship between man and nature, environmental education and conservation, in his honor.

The Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests named him Conservationist of the Year for the second time in 1993.

His grandfather, John Milton Hay, was Abraham Lincoln's private secretary and later Secretary of State under both Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt.

John Hay was also a teacher at Dartmouth College, and among his books were The Run about the alewives and the herring run near his home in Brewster,  Nature's Year: The Seasons of Cape Cod, In Defense of Nature, The Great Beach and A Sense of Nature.

In his first book The Run, 1959, John Hay wrote:

 John Hay a few years ago in Bremen ME.

Knowledge is the motion by which the human animal may come closest to another in the family of living things...
   When the sea pushed inland and the alewives moved ahead or returned, I began to see an infinite route, of surpassing, complex elaboration; and in their pulse and tempo I felt something that gave me present assurance and a touch of joy...
   I have idly wondered whether a single fish, isolated from its brethren, might not suffer some kind of unknown hell of estrangement. I have seen one swimming wildly down a narrow ditch off a tidal inlet as if it knew the crowd had left it behind, and was frantic to get back. Ibid.
   There was an imperative rhythm in their spawning act, with grace in its preparation and power in its fulfillment.  Humanity calls it love...
   What further connections are there , say, between the sun and sight, between our tactile senses and the medium of earth and air in which we are born, between the moon and the tides and the rhythms of water and of blood?
   Who knows more about the universe-I with my conscious measurements, my personal faltering, or the poor fish with its unthinking precision through the various unknown?...
No matter how many times I try to describe the alewife by the uses of human speech, or classify its habits, its intrinsic perfection resists me. It is something else. It goes on defying my own inquiring sense of mystery.

In all, John Hay wrote 18 books. His first, The Run, was published in 1959 and his last, Mind the gap: the education of a nature writer, in 2004, a writing span of almost half a century.

The early days on Cape Cod

Hay attended Harvard, and on graduation worked as Washington correspondent for The Charleston News and Courier. Just before going into the army during World War II, Hay apprenticed himself to Conrad Aiken, the poet, who was living in Brewster at the time.

Hay divided his time in Brewster between clearing land and writing poetry. Before leaving for the service, Hay bought what he thought was 10 acres of land on the top of a nearly treeless hill, close to Aiken's home called "41 Doors" in Brewster near the Stony Brook herring run.

He spent some of his tour of duty in the Army as an associate editor of Yank, the army newspaper.

After his discharge, he and his new wife, Kristi Aresvik Putnam, settled on what turned out to be Hay's 18 acre lot to raise their family, which eventually numbered four, which he called "Dry Hill".

John Hay is recognized by many as a preeminent force and voice in nature writing and regional nonfiction of the twentieth century. He is identified with Cape Cod, where he lives and has written and where he has remained active in environmental politics.

For many, he was the voice of nature and environmental conscience in the Atlantic Northeast during the last half of the twentieth century, communicating in his work his deeply personal experience of the land and sea while enacting that experience in a career of public service and philanthropy that reinforces the environmental ethics and practice found in his writing.

Hay and the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History

On February 20, 1954, Kathryn Berrien, Ruth Francis Clark along with Admont Clark, Ann Thatcher, Harry Holl, John Hay and Scott Corbett met around a table and after a long brainstorming session came up with the name - Cape Cod Junior Museum and they adopted this statement of purpose: "to encourage and enable the children of Cape Cod, and also their parents and teachers, to study the plant, animal, and marine life which abounds so profusely in this region...opening the eyes of children to their relationship with the natural world around them."

The start of the museum was the development of a series of portable exhibit cases of local fauna which were made available to the local schools. This was the beginning of what was to become a major part of the museum's work, the Environmental Education Program in the Cape's schools.

1955 was the beginning of twenty-five years of John Hay's leadership and in 1956 the museum realized its first home, the second floor of the Brewster Town Hall. In 1958 the museum began its first building fund drive and in that same year purchased its first land - 37 acres of Stony Brook valley. In 1959 the membership ratified a change in name to Cape Cod Junior Museum of Natural History and plans were made in January 1960 to establish a trailside museum for the summer with a large tent, located on the current site of the Summer Pavilion.

In 1962 the name was changed to Cape Cod Museum of Natural History to reflect a name to represent all age groups. In 1960 the construction of the museum's first permanent building was completed and is still in use as the Summer Pavilion.

See the books by John Hay here.
Read an excerpt from David Gessner's biography, The Profit of Dry Hill, here.

On August 29, 1968 the museum dedicated a new building which included office and exhibit areas. The Clarence Hay Library was completed and dedicated on April 6, 1975 and in 1980 John Hay stepped down as president after 25 years with this thought "It's time for a change..."

John Hay leaves behind a treasure trove of words and vision for all nature loves on Cape Cod and around the world. - WB

Alice Mae Lopez, Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe member, dies at 49

Former Plimoth Plantation interpreter, director of tribe's housing department dies

The Patriot Ledger reported today that Alice Mae Lopez died Saturday at her home in Mashpee. She was 49. Lopez was the director of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe's housing department. The department, which provides safe, affordable housing to eligible tribe members, was started by Lopez in 2003.

She was born in Hyannis and raised in Mashpee. Lopez graduated from Falmouth High School in 1979. Lopez began her housing career in 1992 when she went to work for the Community Aciton Committee of Cape Cod and the Islands as a housing advocate in 1992.

After graduating, Lopez worked as an interpreter of Native history at Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth in the Wampanoag Indigenous Program. As part of the program she also worked as an artisan, reproducing artifacts for exhibits at the Museum.

Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Chair Cedric Cromwell told the Ledger, "Alice Lopez represented the very best of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe."

Her funeral will be held at 11 a.m. this Saturday, January 8, at the Old Indian Meetinghouse in Mashpee. Burial will follow at the Old Indian Cemetery.

Click here to read Alice Mae Lopez's obituary.

Sources: Patriot Ledger; Chapman, Cole & Gleason Funeral Home.