JOAN GAFFNEY SIMMONS

1933 - 2015

SIMMONS

JOAN GAFFNEY SIMMONS, 81, an able businesswoman and beloved mother of three daughters, passed away Thursday, June 18, 2015 at Temple University Hospital. The daughter of John M. and Katherine Scully Gaffney, she was born on July 18, 1933, in Houghton, Mich. She was raised there and in Marquette until moving to York, Pa., in 1942, when her father joined Read Standard Machinery Co. as chief engineer. She graduated from York Catholic High School in 1951, and, after attending West Chester University, worked in York as a secretary for Bearings Inc. On June 1, 1957, she married Joseph Wright Simmons, a York Catholic classmate, in St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church in York. After a year in Owego, N.Y., where her husband, a physicist, worked for IBM, the couple moved to Lafayette Hill, Pa., where he soon joined LaSalle University, teaching physics until his death in 1991. In 1979, the Simmons's cofounded Outer Products, a Tshirt business whose customers ranged from high school students to Nobel Prize laureates. Beginning with Schroedinger's Equation, the company's semiannual "Journal of Academic Tshirts" marketed dozens of designs, with Joan proposing some of the most successful, from the Periodic Table to a dissected frog. While the couple shared the creative side, she managed the business side with acumen. The company acquired an office/retail complex in Erdenheim which, after her husband's death and the sale of the business in the early 1990s, she continued to manage until her death. She was an accomplished pianist, and her interests included knitting, gardening and bridge. She was an avid and constant reader. In 2007, she sold her home, leaving her Koi pond behind and relocating to Shannondell, the retirement community in Audubon, where she soon built a circle of new friends. Her life was also notable in service to family, as she tended her mother in her final years and her husband in his final illness. There were also narrow escapes, from an airplane crashing into her girlhood home in Houghton to surviving a fall through the ice at York's Farquahar Park.
Survivors include three daughters and sonsinlaw, Mary Joan and Jim Kevlin of Cooperstown, N.Y., Anne and Matthew Lacey of Exton, and Karen and Keith Rylant of Florence, Ala.; six grand-children, Caitlin Lacey Durkin and her husband, David, Anna Lacey Hooven and her husband Ted, and Tara Lacey and her fiancé, Kevin Bogan; Joseph J. Kevlin; and Katherine and Caroline Rylant; and a greatgranddaughter, Grace Katherine Durkin. In addition to her parents and husband, she was predeceased by her brother, Michael Scully Gaffney of Mountain Brook, Ala.
A graveside service was planned in the Gaffney family plot in Holy Saviour Cemetery in York. Interment is private. Arr. are with KIRK & NICE.