Add a Memory
Send Flowers
Make a Donation
Marshall Christian Moore
Marshall Christian Moore
Obituary
Guest Book
Marshall Moore Obituary
Marshall began his career in education by joining Becky at Choate Rosemary Hall in 1984 where he served as an admission officer, English teacher, and rowing coach. In 1988, he was appointed the Director of Admission and boy's crew coach at Brooks School. During a year in Rennes, France, Marshall led family adventures while Becky taught at SYA. They moved to Exeter in 1995, and Marshall worked as Associate Director for the Harvard College Fund.
In 1990, Marshall was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. Often referring to his condition as "Mr. P," Marshall maintained his customary good humor and resolute optimism as he managed the illness for the rest of his life. He co-founded the Seacoast Parkinson's Support Group, where for eighteen years he and fellow members met each month to share information and community. Throughout these years, he dedicated himself to the "symphony of motion," continuing to row, run, bike, and dance for as long as he was able, even competing at the USA Track & Field Masters Championships in 2004.
Most of all, Marshall loved to be on the water, where he imparted rowing wisdom, as well as an appreciation for river wildlife (and his favorite dance music). After Choate and Brooks, Marshall coached at Phillips Exeter Academy, Great Bay Rowing, and Community Rowing. In his later years as a coach emeritus at Exeter, he continued to ride the launches on the Squamscott River, lending his keen eye and sharing words of inspiration to athletes and other coaches alike.
Beyond his sporting pursuits, Marshall admired beauty of many kinds. Along with dealing in antiques, he collected paintings and furnishings for his family's home in Exeter. Forever observant, he also developed his voice on the page by writing poetry and short stories. By example, he taught his sons to appreciate design, art, writing, and all things sweet - especially his signature chocolate chip cookies and whiskey sours.
Marshall is survived by his wife M. Rebecca "Becky" Moore, his three sons, Nicholas W. Moore (Irina Eremenko), Davis H. Moore (Liza Williams), and Timothy C. Moore (F Taylor Colantonio), his two grandchildren, Sylvia and Winslow, his mother Barbara Moore, his sister Elizabeth Faria, his two brothers Taft and Allan Moore, as well as many other dear and extended family. Marshall will be remembered for his competitive spirit, equanimity, humor, and kindness.
A memorial service for Marshall will be held at Christ Church, Exeter, NH, on Saturday, November 23, 2024, at 2:00. For those who wish to attend online, a link will be available on the church's website. In lieu of flowers, please honor Marshall by donating to the financial aid fund at Community Rowing in Brighton, MA (https://communityrowing.org/donate/make-a-donation/).
"It's a great art, is rowing. It's the finest art there is. It's a symphony of motion. And when you're rowing well, why it's nearing perfection. And when you reach perfection, you're touching the Divine. It touches you of yous, which is your soul." George Pocock
To plant trees in memory, please visit the Sympathy Store.
Steve Hermans
November 28, 2024
Marshall asked me if he could play on our Exeter Taverners indoor soccer team. I knew nothing about his soccer skills, but that didn´t matter. I knew he was living with Parkinson´s. I knew he was clever and fun. I invited him to join us for the next game.
Marshall was an inspiration. Despite the Parkinson´s, he could still sprint, and sprint he did, up and down the wing, relentlessly. I could tell that he enjoyed it. Marshall´s spirit was irrepressible. He was courageous. No one would fail to make a 100% effort after watching Marshall. He was a great teammate.
Steve Hermans
Carolyn Hilles-Pilant
November 23, 2024
When Becky and my husband Keith were teaching at School Year Abroad France in the mid-90s, Marshall and I had wonderful times together while the boys were in school and our spouses were teaching. Several times a week we would get the shopping done and then often do something just for fun until it was time to pick up the boys from school. I remember one glorious fall day careening through the French countryside. He turned to me and asked, "Do you know why we´re doing this?" He answered his own question joyfully: "Because we can!"
Marshall was already living with his diagnosis at that point, though I didn´t know that until some time later. I admire Marshall for many things- his sense of humor, his intelligence, his constant attention to his family, but most of all for his capacity to enjoy life to the utmost in circumstances that would crush a man of lesser spirit and courage.
With love and appreciation for the example of his life,
Carolyn
Anne Loseff
November 23, 2024
/Users/anne/Library/Messages/Attachments/71/01/D121ECCB-E346-42BF-8E2E-5E9D57B88DCD/Marshall Moore memory.pdf
Anne Richard Loseff
November 22, 2024
My first memory of Marshall was when he and Paul Russell decided that since I refused to GO to the film Jaws, they would bring it into my Weld Hall bedroom. It was Freshman Year at Harvard. 1975. Marshall did the music plus the increasingly loud "dub-Duh-duh-Duh- duh-DUH" whilst beating his strong rower´s fingers in tempo- louder and louder on my desk. Paul narrrated. It was hysterically funny and terrifying in one. I remember pulling me knees up to my chest. I didn´t want to see the bloody film because I swam around those waters in the summer.
They were having none of it and the same grin in the heartbreakingly beautiful photo we all can see, was maniacally grinning at me as he pounded away. Another wonderful memory is of Becky allowing him to dance with other girls in room parties, me included. I just loved to dance with Marshall because he knew how and he would grin as he twirled me around. He was the most loyal friend and the most committed teacher.
In our10th Reunion book, he exhorted the class to out down its 80s aspirations of Wall Street wealth and to follow a far more honourable path, which he correctly viewed as teaching. I only met one son, Nick, who stayed with me in London one summer.The combination of The Moore teaching ethos was clear to see.
Marshall´s was a very long and hard fought battle. He would not give up. For me, it puts him amoungst the most respected of any man or woman I know. He stands amoungst the greats. Becky stands right rock steady next to him.
Marshall, may you bring the Harvard Henley Heavyweights first across the line every year.
You will be so, so missed and yet, I am happy that your pain is ended and that you are now at peace. With love always, Anne
How you can show support
Send flowers
Consider sending flowers.
Add photos
Share their life with photo memories.
Plant trees
Honor them by planting trees in their memory.
Follow this page
Get email updates whenever changes are made.
Donate in Memory
Make a donation in memory of your loved one.
Share this page
Invite other friends and family to visit the page.
Brian Hall
November 15, 2024
Marshall and I met more than 20 years ago at an open mic on Hampton Beach. I was puzzled by the trumpet he had in tow and wondered what sort of performance he would be doing. I had been a working musician and had never seen a man with a trumpet at a open mic before. After asking Marshall how long he had been playing that thing, he gave me the impression that he just brought it for some chuckles and Igot my very first Marshall laugh, and smile.
I fell in love with Marshall´s spirit and warmth. When I learned we both have Parkinsob´s, I knew we were meant to be friends. And true friends we were!
Who he was and how he treated peoqle I use as the benchmark in my own life. Rest in peace, dear friend. Thanks for all the laughs! Your spirit lives on in me!
Jim Landis
November 2, 2024
Marshall must have been at least five years beyond his initial Parkinson's diagnosis when I first fell in with him, since he and his family didn't move to Exeter until 1995. (My family and I had moved to Exeter from New York City in late 1993.)
Marshall and I met for the first time then or thereafter at the new gym (though it closed in 2012, to become a rehab center), Synergy.
We both took, regularly, a morning spin class and were, so far as I can remember, the only males in attendance in what was almost always a full studio. We never spun near each other (Marshall tended to run late) and so were always kind of hidden out among the many women, most, if not all, of whom were our superiors at that grueling form of exercise. We were not there to watch women exercise. Nor ourselves. Marshall's form was no doubt better than mine, since I was told--loudly, publicly embarrassingly--by our very fit instructor Fish to get my head up and stop gazing at my own thighs.
So for some years, as Marshall and I slowly grew to interact and know each other, he and I worked out hard, led by Mary or Fish, and sometimes at the end of class would talk, usually, as I recall, about writing.
I was very surprised to read in this Legacy that Marshall had been suffering from Parkinson's for so relatively long before I first met him, because it was some years after I met him that I first noticed, as he would walk tardily into class, that his gait seemed to have changed, having become a bit, I suppose might be said, disordered, as if he were growing unsure of just how and where to place down his next step. That was when I began, somewhat worriedly, to look for him on his bike in every class, where I I was relieved to observe that he remained as controlled and strong as ever in his spinning.
I do believe it was not long after my first seeing the change in his walking that he or Becky told me about his Parkinson's. I don't remember if and when he stopped taking that class. I didn't attend it for two years beginning September 11, 2001, when I saw on a TV monitor outside the studio at about 8:50 am that a plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers. The damage at that time appeared on the screen to be minimal. Simply a new, dark smudge on the side of the building. Class began at 9 am. By the time it was over, both towers had been struck and the second, the South Tower, came down first, just as we walked out of class. I couldn't accept, couldn't at first believe, that I had been spinning the entire time so much destruction had been done and so many lives lost, and, as I said, it was two years until I could bring myself to participate again in what seemed so foolish an enterprise-spinning, for heaven's sake!-while so many people were dying.
Whether or not it was in class, Marshall and I kept up our acquaintance. It was at a party in 2005 at his family's home that my wife and I admired a lovely, dramatic, unfinished painting of a woman that had been signed "Whistler" but that Marshall informed us was a fake, as he had confirmed by having taken it all the way to Scotland to show it to a Whistler expert, who declared it counterfeit.
Soon after that party, I told Marshall that I wanted to buy the painting (he was selling paintings and rugs at the time) to celebrate the publication of my wife, Denise's, New York Times cookbook, Dinner for Eight. That painting now hangs in a prominent place in our Exeter dining room; far more prominently than does what I consider my late painter mother's best work, of a house Denise and I had rented in Montisi, Italy. The "Whistler" is my favorite work of art in our home, and it has, since we acquired it in 2005, reminded me of Marshall whenever I pass by it. And now that remembrance will be filled with some sadness mingling with the appreciation of the extraordinary man who passed that painting from his hands to ours.
I can't and don't know what Marshall was like in his private, hidden moments, suffering as he must have been. But whenever I was with him, from the days when I didn't know he was ill through the days when he had lost the ability to speak except via a machine, I was always cheered by him, because he was not only such an interesting person (so athletic, so sophisticated in the arts, including the written word), but he was at least as much an interested person, in you and what you were doing and what it meant to you and, because of that, what it seemed to mean to him. He was a great, smiling (often beaming) enthusiast for (to take the words from a Richard Wilbur poem) the Things of This World.
It's a better world for him to have been in it and a lesser, emptier world now that he's left it.
Susan Cole Ross
October 30, 2024
Taking a student to the coffee shop, when they earned it, was always a delight if we ran into Marshall. His beaming smile and kind words always made my day and reminded me of his warm and brilliant connection with my dad.
Andrew Rondeau
October 27, 2024
Marshall taught me that courage is looking inward when everything compels you to look around.
In my final race of my final year with Exeter Boys´ Crew, our first eight placed second in our heat after a string of disappointments. Having barely squeezed into the final, we paced along the shoreline wondering if we had lost our touch.
With the power of a few words and a short poem, Marshall revived our team. He told us with pure conviction that we could win and that nothing else that day-other boats, the weather, our racing lane-could change that. And win we did. The picture of our boat that day still hangs in the boathouse, but he is the tenth man not pictured. I am now in my 15th year of rowing, and not a single day on the water goes by in which I do not think about Coach Moore. He was and is and always will be to me a paragon of the sport.
With Love and Condolences,
Andrew Rondeau
Showing 1 - 8 of 8 results
Make a Donation
in Marshall Moore's name
How to support Marshall's loved ones
Honor a beloved veteran with a special tribute of ‘Taps’ at the National WWI Memorial in Washington, D.C.
The nightly ceremony in Washington, D.C. will be dedicated in honor of your loved one on the day of your choosing.
Read more
Should I Send Sympathy Flowers?
What kind of arrangement is appropriate, where should you send it, and when should you send an alternative?
Read more
What Should I Write in a Sympathy Card?
We'll help you find the right words to comfort your family member or loved one during this difficult time.
Read moreResources to help you cope with loss
Estate Settlement Guide
If you’re in charge of handling the affairs for a recently deceased loved one, this guide offers a helpful checklist.
Read more
Obituaries, grief & privacy: Legacy’s news editor on NPR podcast
Legacy's Linnea Crowther discusses how families talk about causes of death in the obituaries they write.
Read more
The Five Stages of Grief
They're not a map to follow, but simply a description of what people commonly feel.
Read moreWays to honor Marshall Moore's life and legacy
Obituary Examples
You may find these well-written obituary examples helpful as you write about your own family.
Read more
Obituary Templates – Customizable Examples and Samples
These free blank templates make writing an obituary faster and easier.
Read more
How Do I Write a Eulogy?
Some basic help and starters when you have to write a tribute to someone you love.
Read more
