Sherman Poland

Poland, Sherman
Sherman Poland, father of town resident Susan Poland, passed away on April 5, 2013 at the age of 90. The cause of death was pneumonia.
Sherman was born on December 15, 1922 in Boston, Massachusetts. He was graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, and served as a lieutenant (JG) in the U.S. Navy during World War II, primarily in the Pacific theatre of operations. He moved to Washington D.C. in 1950where he met his wife and lifelong love, Nancy. He was a partner in a small Washington, D.C. law firm for most of his career, arguing two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1997 he was appointed as an administrative law judge with the Social Security Administration in Philadelphia and served in that capacity until he retired at age 88 in 2011.
Excellence and fairness in all he undertook were very important to him. He loved scholarship, God, and nature. He entertained his daughters throughout their childhoods with stories of his own boyhood, transporting them to a different era. Although it seems unlikely that a boy who punched his third grade teacher for confiscating his baseball mitt would grow up to be a judge, this is how things worked out.
Sherman never got enough of sailing or of Maine, where he and his family spent many golden -and quite a few foggy-summer days. He was ambitious about social justice and civil rights and he modeled in his interactions with others, the change he sought for society. He appreciated a starry night at sea, rugosa roses, a good pun and a well-made suit. He could be short-tempered and was especially frustrated by technology, regarding it as if it were a problem in theoretical physics that could be mastered only by effort and logic. His struggles to remain patient with day-to-day setbacks were more than counterbalanced by his courage in the face of adversity, by his truelove for his wife and by his generosity to his daughters and friends. Sherman was a proud man who was endowed with the humility to spend his life learning.
Sherman is survived by his wife, Nancy, his daughters Susan (Greenwich, CT), Sarah (The Hague, Netherlands), Courtney (Frederick, Md.) and Leslie (Olney, Md.) and son-in-law William Foster (Olney, Md.), as well as by his granddaughter Alexandra (Boca Raton, Fl.), his sister Helen Lindsay (Ridgewood, NJ) and three nephews and their spouses and children. A memorial service is planned for April 19 in Philadelphia.