Memoriam
Sydney Rollins Badmington
Sydney Rollins Badmington, 88, died Oct. 2, 2009. She donated a conservation easement on her 8.87 acres on Little Sunapee Road in New London in March of 2003. Syd Badmington wanted to restrict development, preserve open space and protect the Little Lake Sunapee watershed. She knew that without these protections, under New London cluster zoning her land could have up to eight dwellings built on it. She explained, "I didn't think it was big enough to count very much, but when I think of all the property around the lake that has been built on, then I had to do it."
She was born in Boston and moved at a young age to Newport, NH, where her father ran the family woolen business. She moved to Little Sunapee Road in New London in 1961 where she raised her four children. In the early 1960s, she ran a nursery school in her living room, and soon began work at King Ridge Ski Area, where she worked as office manager for 20 years. She served as emergency dispatcher for the town before retiring.
Syd was active in town affairs - investing countless hours over many years, passionately protecting the character of her community as a member of the Planning Board. When her children were grown, Syd began to follow her taste for adventure and the unconventional. She explored India, South Africa, Norway, Nepal, Russia, Alaska, Kamchatka, Mongolia, and many more corners of the world.
Her son, Rich Badmington, observed about his mother’s living legacy, “The courage to make a decision about a permanent easement comes easier to those who know in their hearts and feel in their soul that nature is not there to be consumed but sustained. As a mischievous young kid, I explored every corner of these woods and the brooks that run through them.
“Today, thanks to my mother’s care of her land, I can return with my own children and open their eyes to the small wonder of this space. They will one day experience the very same joy.”
[This property is listed as #44 in the Protected Properties section of our web site.]
Sydney L. Crook
Sydney Lomax Crook, 91, died April 25, 2010. He was born Aug. 11, 1918, in the Crook family home on Lake Sunapee, New London. He was inducted into the U.S. Army from New London as a private 11 months before Pearl Harbor. He graduated from officer candidate school in 1945 and after five years of active service he was discharged as a major. He then served 15 years with the active reserve and retired as a lieutenant colonel.
He graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1948 and retired from Raytheon as an electrical engineer in 1981.
He loved Lake Sunapee and the New London area. He was a 23-year member of the town of New London Planning Board, and a past president of the Sunapee Historical Society. He was a member of the Lake Sunapee Yacht Club since 1939 and an active member of the Lake Sunapee Star Fleet from 1955.
IN HIS LIFE: The residents of New London will always remember Sydney. In 2001 Colby-Sawyer College dedicated the conference room of their town offices in the old Colby Academy Building to Syd, in appreciation for the donation he made to the college that prompted them to donate the building to New London. In 2006, he donated four picturesque acres of land on Davis Hill, called Clark Lookout, named after his mother, to the town of New London and Ausbon Sargent Trust. Please click on this link to read the story behind Syd’s decision to give Clark Lookout to the citizens of New London.
Syd is one of the few New Londoners who had been on a steamship on Lake Sunapee. He rode the Kearsarge 12 times. When the Kearsarge sank he and his best friend, Harold Pratt, sawed off the pilothouse and towed it to his home on the lake. That pilothouse now welcomes all visitors to the Sunapee Museum in Sunapee Harbor.
Lincoln Gordon
Lincoln Gordon, Ausbon Sargent land donor died on December 19, 2009 at age 96. Dr Gordon donated a conservation easement of 35.7 acres in February 1995. This property was one of Ausbon Sargent’s earliest easements which protected vital Lake Sunapee and Otter Pond shoreline - including 1,000 feet of shoreline along Lake Sunapee, 1,075 feet of shoreline along Otter Pond, and 1,075 feet road frontage along Rt. 11. The protected land cannot be subdivided or built upon and the property must remain forested. [The property listed as #4 in the Protected Properties section of our web site. The property was sold to Dick & Jean Dulude in 2003.]
Lincoln Gordon was a diplomat, educator and political economist who was the American ambassador to Brazil in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and the president of Johns Hopkins University in the late 1960s. He was the author of books on government, the economy, energy and national security, foreign policy in Europe and Latin America, and Brazil’s emergence from military dictatorships to partnership with the nations of North and South America.
After the election of President John F. Kennedy in 1960, Dr. Gordon served on a task force that developed the Alliance for Progress, the program that provided aid intended to dissuade Latin America from revolution and socialism. Dr. Gordon took up the ambassadorship in Brazil in 1961. Later, President Lyndon B. Johnson praised his service as “a rare combination of experience and scholarship, idealism and practical judgment.”
Thaddeus Johnson
Thad Johnson died November 25, 2009. He and his wife Virginia donated a 92 acre conservation easement on their property in Sutton Mills in August, 2008. Their conservation easement protects 92 acres of woodlands with frontage on three public roads. The property borders the west side of Route 114, the north side of Village Road, and the east side of scenic Corporation Hill Road. The addition of this easement expands a corridor of conserved properties from the southeastern side of Kezar Lake southward to Sutton Mills. Additionally, the easement has miles of hiking trails created by Thad Johnson – a project begun when they moved to the farm in 1970 and when they added more acreage in 1986. He bought a used dozer and, over a 10-year period, constructed the trails on the land in Sutton Mills.
Thad grew up in South Dakota and received his BS in Civil Engineering from the University of Colorado. At the end of WWII, he was able to pursue a career in engineering – working for Standard Oil Company in Venezuela. A Master of Science degree from Harvard University's School of Engineering led him and his growing family back to South America to design and supervise construction of large infrastructure projects in Argentina, Bolivia, and Brazil.
In his retirement, Thad dedicated himself to the things he loved most and, for the first time, had the leisure to pursue: fixing things up, playing the guitar, singing Bach Cantatas, rebuilding engines, collecting his own firewood, running (he ran the Boston marathon three times), dancing (square and round), skiing, and hiking in Europe. For the past 20 years, he enjoyed making an annual trek in winter by car to the land of his birth (the West) with his wife of 57 years, Virginia, and their dogs (two generations of Labradors). [Visit our web site Protected Properties/Trails/Sutton to get a map of the wonderful trails on the Johnson easement # 85.]
Donald M. Sisson
Donald M. Sisson, 85, of Kendal at Hanover, died Monday, May 3, 2010 peacefully. Executive Director Debbie Stanley wrote the following remembrance, “Don Sisson was one of the original five founders of Ausbon Sargent who signed and filed the Articles of Agreement on September 25, 1987. He was our first treasurer and served for seven years. Don, Heidi (Lauridsen) and Dale (Garvey) were the team of three who offered me the ‘one-year’ position as Executive Director. The land trust’s first computer was a gift from Don. He and his wife Ruth were a big part of the successful fundraiser “Spring Shenanigan’s”. Don wrote many of the early newsletter articles. He was respected by all. When Don spoke, everyone listened. The idea for our first strategic plan in 1992 originated with Don. I adored Don. He was a man of great wisdom and intelligence……..a friend to all and a mentor to me. He will be dearly missed but not forgotten.”
Don Sisson was born in Worcester, MA on August 17, 1924 the son of the late Eugene A. Sisson and Grace E. (Watson) Sisson. He was educated in Worcester public schools and was valedictorian of his class at Worcester Academy in 1941. He then entered Dartmouth and after service in the US Army from 1943-1945 returned to Dartmouth and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in 1947, Phi Beta Kappa, and a Master of Science in Engineering and Business Administration in 1948 at Thayer and Tuck. His early business association was with a family-owned firm in the packaging machine industry, in Worcester and New York City. After that company was sold, he joined IBM in 1956 and experienced the glory days of its rapid growth, first in field sales, then in various corporate positions, which included travel opportunity to Latin America and the Pacific basin countries, which he especially enjoyed. In 1947 he married Ruth MacIver, whom he often referred to as "the light of my life." They had played piano duets together when she was eight and he was nine. They lived in Tenafly, NJ, 1952 to 1970 and then in New Canaan, CT, whence they moved to their vacation home in New London, NH in 1982, and to Kendal at Hanover in 2002. In New London he was a past president of the Historical Society; a member of the Conservation Commission; a founder and treasurer of The Ausbon Sargent Land Preservation Trust; and chairman of the Friends of the Library, Colby-Sawyer College. In 2001, he and Ruth shared the Town Award given annually by Colby-Sawyer for service to town and college. An assignment the he especially enjoyed was leading the research and selection of photographs for "Our Voices, Our Town, a History of New London, NH 1950-2000." He was a member of The First Baptist Church and of the Boys Club of New London.
Memorial contributions to The New London Historical Society, P.O. Box 965 or The Ausbon Sargent Land Preservation Trust, P.O. Box 2040, both New London, NH 03257, will be appreciated.
