Alice Mary McCurdy

Alice Mary McCurdy passed away suddenly on December 9, 2025. She was at home with family.

Alice Mary (A.M.) McCurdy was born May 5, 1930, in Cut Bank, Montana (Glacier County), to ranchers Raymond and Madeline Johnson. The youngest of five, the first vehicle she drove was a tractor, and she enjoyed the opportunity to drive heavy equipment for the rest of her life. Alice Mary graduated from Cut Bank High School as President of the Class of 1948. For the rest of her life, she felt a deep connection to her home state.

Alice Mary attended the University of Washington, graduating with a degree in English. She was a member of the P.E.O. Sisterhood and the Delta Gamma sorority. After graduation, A.M. traveled to Venezuela to visit her older brother, Ray, and ended up staying and teaching the third grade in a Gulf Oil Company camp. There she met Garvin McCurdy, home from college before he started his active-duty service in the US Air Force. This is about the time that she started to introduce herself as "A.M.," having always thought that "Alice Mary" was simply too dull.

In 1953, A.M. flew to Puerto Rico, Garvin's first station, where they were married. Garvin's career kept them on the move, as shown by their children's places of birth: Great Falls, twenty-five years in the USAF, raising their family in about twenty different homes. A.M. and Garvin eventually settled in Kittery Point, Maine. Once there, A.M. had a twenty-year career at the Portsmouth Regional Hospital, retiring as the manager of volunteers.

She was an excellent golfer, dangerous at the bridge table, a voracious reader, and an active member of Kittery Point First Congregational Church. She was a famous baker of pies and a heroic gardener, planting trees and digging up the rocky soil of their yard to make raspberry and flower beds. Her field of purple lupin is well-known to local plein air painters. She enjoyed attending the Sunday afternoon Portland Symphony Orchestra concerts and the Metropolitan Opera simulcasts, loved to travel, and tolerated the long line of cats and dogs her children managed to leave at the house. She will be dearly missed by her many friends from over the decades, her book club of twenty years, and especially by the Wednesday Walkers. With them, she strode around Fort Foster at speed, solving the problems of the world, laughing, and taking care of each other when help was needed. She was a loyal and loving friend.

She was the last of her generation, being predeceased by her parents, Raymond and Medeline Johnson, her sister Shirley Murty, her brothers Raymond Jr., Kenneth, and Bill. She is survived by her husband of 72 years, Garvin, and their children, Paul and his wife Debra, Morgan, Jennifer, and her husband Steve, and Scott and his husband, Benjamin, as well as six grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held on March 7 at First Congregational Church at Kittery Point. In lieu of flowers, memorial donations may be made to Smiletrain.org, an organization that provides operations for those born with cleft lips and palates, or to the First Congregational Church at Kittery Point, Maine.