I have been in Raleigh handling a family emergency when I received word of a memorial service in celebration of the lives of Nancy and Lin Urban today in Swarthmore. Nancy was a Christian educator and Lin began the Religion Department at Swarthmore College making it one of the top Religion Departments in the nation. If you choose, just google their names. David, EA’76 will deliver my remarks in absentia. I don’t think the connections with a family are as pivotal as my relationship with the Urbans. People ask me how did you get to EA. Here is the partial answer. I call it the Urban Connection.
Legacy of Two Worlds The Reverend James R. Squire October 22, 2022
Delivered by David Urban, EA ‘76
I learned of the deaths of Nancy and Lin this past Tuesday while driving to Raleigh where my wife, Vicki, and I needed to attend to her seriously ill sister. I encourage everyone to read the information about the lives of Nancy and Lin, and their immense legacy of supporting those who were underserved and those who were well served. Their legacy includes their children Joan, David, Ann, and Cathy who died at the age of four.
I wanted to address you this morning about the things that are not in their bios that relate directly to Vicki, me and our children Thaddeus, Joanna who died at age four, Adam and Spencer.
But first I have to help you understand a brief brush stroke on the canvas of my life in order for you to see what Nancy and Lin mean to me and why Joan gave me permission to write this reflection.
I have lived in two different worlds all my life just as Nancy and Lin did but in a different way. I was underserved and Lin and Nancy spent their lives helping those who were in the world of the underserved. I went to a public school. They, however, went to the elite private schools, Choate and Shipley.
I grew up in Conshohocken when the mills were failing. My father was not a college professor. He had a 6th grade education and my mother was a high school graduate. My father had a crippling stroke when I was in 10th grade and was out of work for a year. There was little money. We were only able to survive because of his meatcutters union job. I graduated from high school as valedictorian. Salaries from various jobs in mills including a steel mill enabled me to go to a state college. My youth was the world of the have nots. I was given a “scholarship” to work as a janitor in my high school before my freshman year at college.
Then my life took a turn. I was accepted to Berkeley Divinity School at Yale where Lin’s father, a fiery passionate intellectual, was one of my professors. His dad saw something in me. He believed in me. I became a Traveling Fellow to Duke and Duke Medical Center where there was a concentration on patient counseling under supervision. I also furthered my academic life with the study of psychology and the relationship of that discipline to theology.
My next stop was Trinity Church, Swarthmore for seven years living in a community that I always described as a seven years swing through an intellectual jungle gym. I loved every minute in this vibrant church, college, and town. I was in the world of an elite community, of the haves, interested in the world, nationally, internationally, and globally. It was the world of the served. No one worried about their next meal. It was there that I met Lin and Nancy.
My relationship with Nancy was characterized by the direct nature of her communications. If you wanted an honest answer to a question, ask Nancy. If you didn’t want that, run away quickly. She cared deeply about people and was someone with an understated warmth, a brilliant mind, and she was just plain fun. Nancy along with the entire Swarthmore community had high expectations. Conversations centered on morality and its relationship to politics. Sorry, but there were few conversations there about the Eagles or Phillies.
Lin treated me as an equal in matters of the mind, but when we would debate an issue, he wasn’t concerned about winning. He was always the teacher and would remind me of issues to strengthen my point of view.
All of what I have mentioned thus far was a prelude to the legacy that Nancy and Lin gave me.
During my seventh year at Trinity, our daughter Joanna, was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of leukemia. Joanna was one of thirty -three children in the nation with that diagnosis at the time and the youngest child at CHOP to receive a Bone Marrow Transplant as a last resort. She was diagnosed on Good Friday. We brought her home from the transplant on her birthday, November 8, and she died on Christmas Eve. Nancy was a special support to Vicki. Mothers who have lost daughters is a club to which no one wants to belong; however, it creates an intense bonding because of the shared experience.
During that same time period when my daughter was at CHOP, Lin had received a copy of the Episcopal Academy Magazine where David was a student at the time. The magazine contained a job description for the next chaplain. I think Lin had an exaggerated understanding of what I could do when he exclaimed, “This is you!” Counselor, academician, leader who can work with a wide range of people. I knew nothing about the Episcopal Academy. Because I was spending time between Trinity and CHOP, my first and only priority, was my daughter so I never followed through. But Lin would remind me periodically, and finally I sent the application in and forgot all about it because of my focus elsewhere. Eventually, I was called to be Head Chaplain at EA as Chair of the Religion Department, Head of Pastoral Counseling, and one of the leaders of the school. Lin and Nancy were ecstatic if not thrilled in their reserved emotional nature to all things. I retired in 2016 after thirty-eight years in that world, a mix of the haves and have nots, two worlds.
People in the EA community say that “Jim Squire has friends in low and high places and if he calls you, pick up the phone because he never calls about the weather.” Those worlds describe the worlds in which I have lived. Those words could just as well be said of Lin and Nancy in terms of their life’s work. They believed in so many students as well as others they served. Their legacy includes a multitude of people. They have created an invisible and visible inheritance.
You see both of them also believed in me. They both gave me the best legacy that a person could have, not money or property. I literally would not have had the life I have had without those two special people. THEY GAVE ME A LEGACY OF A FUTURE.
God bless you Lin and Nancy!
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