Robert DuCharme

Robert "Bob" DuCharme died January 7, 2024 at Vernon Green in Vernon, Vermont, where he had been a resident for several years. Bob was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut on October 19, 1935, and grew up in nearby Milford. As president of his senior class at Milford High, he and his best friend and class vice president, Jim Farrell, performed song and dance routines that they reprised at class reunions over 50 years later.
With plans to become an actor, Bob graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City in 1958. While working as an NBC page on Jack Paar's Tonight Show he and several other pages had their own Saturday morning TV show, "Al Rucker and the Seven Teens," on a Providence Rhode Island NBC affiliate, where they performed skits to the current top hits.
Bob's show business career was interrupted when he was drafted into the Army in 1959. He married his girlfriend, Lorinda (Linda) Case, and she joined him in Germany, where he was stationed. They remained happily married until her death from Parkinson's Disease in 2020.
Upon their return to the US, he worked in advertising sales at the Milford Citizen newspaper. He began directing plays and musicals in community theaters in southern Connecticut, including the musical "Oliver" at New Haven's Hopkins School in 1971. After directing several more shows there, he accepted the school's offer of a full-time position as a drama teacher and director in 1973. With the academic schedule leaving his summers free, he produced twelve successful seasons of dinner theater in Milford after he convinced a local Holiday Inn manager to let him build a set and cast and publicize plays by Neil Simon and other popular playwrights.
Bob taught at Hopkins and directed several shows a year there until he and Linda moved to Brookline, Vermont in 1985. He then worked on the advertising staff of the Brattleboro Reformer, where Linda was the night editor, until his retirement. He continued to teach public speaking and to direct plays and musicals in the Brattleboro area, bringing the total number of productions he had directed in his career up to 118.
He loved cooking, gardening, eating, drinking, and traveling with Linda. They made their most recent trip to Europe in 2006 when they visited the German family who they had lived with 46 years earlier during Bob's military service. Their 61-year marriage was an inspiration to all of their family and friends.
Bob will be remembered for his boundless enthusiasm, his sense of humor, his creativity, and his special joy in seeing cast members with no acting experience blossom in lead roles. He is survived by his sisters Joan and Dorothy, his children Bob Jr., Ann, Julie, and Peter, six grandchildren, and a great-grandson.
The family is planning a service in the spring, with a reception to follow.