Lucy Baker Sharp died peacefully at home in Lacey, Wash., on Nov. 18. She would have turned 75 on Dec. 16.
The daughter of Alice and Robert Hufstader of New York city, Lucy spent childhood summers on the Vineyard learning to sail at the Edgartown Yacht Club, following her two older brothers Peter and Jonathan. At 12, she proudly recalled, she was suspended from the E.Y.C. along with a friend for unladylike activities.
It was not the first time Lucy clashed with authority. At six or seven, boarded at Spence School in New York while her parents were away, she sought to dispose of a bottle of hated cod liver oil by throwing it out the window. Not wanting to harm someone passing on the street, she tossed it out into the inner courtyard. As her name was on the bottle, and she was the only boarder, the school administration came down, as did her mother.
After graduating from Ethel Walker School and Rollins College, Lucy married George B. Sharp in 1963, settling in Katonah, N.Y. where the couple raised three children. Continuing the tradition of her maternal grandmother, Alice Mary Sloane Anderson, Lucy served as a volunteer for 10 years at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, developing a program to help inmates prepare for release.
She attended Yale Divinity School, obtaining a master’s degree and completing training as a chaplain. She worked as a pediatric chaplain at the Westchester Medical Center, and after she and George moved to Vermont, Lucy was named the Episcopal chaplain at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center.
The couple’s next move was to Washington state, where Lucy started a prison ministry program at the Washington Correctional Institute from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Gig Harbor.
She loved traveling, and accompanied husband George on some of his business trips to West Africa and Bermuda, as well as many cruises and land trips.
She was the granddaughter of Laurilla and William H. Hufstader of Buffalo and of Alice and Arthur Anderson of Bedford Hills, whose summer home on North Water street in Edgartown became her parents’ home.
She survived by her daughters Ruth Keilty of Etobicoke, Ont., and Carolyn Sharp of Seattle, Wash.; a son George A. Sharp of Steilacoom, Wash.; her brothers Peter Hufstader of Avon, Conn. and Jonathan Hufstader of Storrs, Conn.; and many grandchildren.
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