THOMAS GRAHAM SPEER

SPEER, Thomas Graham Age 75, died on December 10, 2022 at Saint Vincent's Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts. He leaves his wife of fifty years, Judith Kingsbury Speer of Hudson, Massachusetts; son Matthew Robert Speer and daughter-in-law Erin Annis of Portland Oregon; brother Robert Elliott Speer of Sedgwick, Maine; and sister Margaret Beryl Speer of Watertown, Massachusetts. He was the son of William Speer and Elizabeth Lester Speer. Tom attended The Shady Hill School in Cambridge, The Putney School in Vermont and graduated Summa Cum Laude from Harvard College in 1968. He continued with graduate studies at Rutgers University in English Literature which he taught for three years at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri and later studied at Simmons College in Boston, where he received his Master's Degree in Library Science in 1978. With this degree, he went to work for a company in Littleton, Massachusetts, Inforonics, which was then among the first to design computerized systems for libraries. From there, he moved to Digital Electronics in Marlboro, Littleton and Nashua, and concentrated on computer software. He remained there through its corporate changes, and eventually retired as a Senior Software Engineer in 2005 from Hewlett Packard. When Tom was not working, he most enjoyed spending time with his family and friends at their vacation home in Weymouth, NovaScotia. Newfoundland was also a destination that he loved to explore and photograph. Always a voracious reader, he amassed an extensive collection of works from Shakespeare to Tolkein in both of his homes. He kept up with literary criticism and enjoyed corresponding with readers of the Times Literary Supplement and other journals. When he was younger, he studied piano and also enjoyed playing the recorder with his wife and friends, but in recent years, he mainly listened to music, favoring the classics, including but not limited to Mozart, Beethoven and Mahler on LPS, CDs and eventually Spotify. On TV, he would often choose British dramas, documentaries or comedies, but also enjoyed a cooking lesson from Ming Tsai or Julia Child. He was a great cook and loved to make the traditional Christmas dinner of "Roast Beast" with all the trimmings for his family. He was a friend of any dog who crossed his path. He had an eclectic taste in movies, but particularly loved "The Apu Trilogy" of the Indian director Satyajit Ray, the Turner Classic Movie Channel, the original Star Wars series, Sean Connery as James Bond, and probably anything by Rudyard Kipling or starring Alec Guiness. The family brought his ashes to rest in Nova Scotia in August of 2023, in several places that they had visited together and that he remembered and loved, from times in childhood that he spent camping in the Margaree Valley of Cape Breton, and, finally, near the shore in front of their home in Weymouth as the sun set over the Saint Mary's Bay. He will be forever in their hearts.

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