Obituary of Barbara McCrea Reich

Barbara McCrea Reich passed away on November 7, 2024. Barbara was the loving wife of the late James B. Reich, devoted mother of Elizabeth and the late Daniel, and beloved grandmother of Sophia and Nicholas Holl. She will always be remembered for her sweet disposition, her originality, her joyful enthusiasm, her awesome intelligence, her deep faith, and her infinite love for her friends and family.

Barbara was born in 1934 in New London, Connecticut. Her parents, Victor B. McCrea and Eleanore Sutherland, met in a whirl of US Navy social life in California, eloped, and had Barbara a year later.

Barbara spent her childhood moving to wherever her father, a naval officer, was called for duty. From New London her family moved to Honolulu, where her brother Bruce was born, and then returned to New London before heading to Norfolk, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. They came back to New London around 1941 to settle in for the war.

Barbara’s father bought a large clapboard house a block from the Long Island Sound for the family to live in while he toured the Pacific as a submarine captain. Barbara remembered this house and neighborhood fondly for the rest of her life, describing days spent playing with neighborhood children, swimming in the Sound, and helping her mother in their large Victory garden.

After the war, Barbara’s family moved back to Honolulu for a few years, and from there to California, where they eventually bought a small house in Carmel. She would always remember Carmel for its spectacular scenery, and it was there that she developed her love for music, astronomy, and botany—and surprised herself and everyone else by winning several high school medals for swimming.

Barbara graduated from high school at 16 and went to Mills College in Oakland, California, where she majored in history. She spent holidays with Austrian friends who lived on a remote ranch in British Columbia, a beautiful place that she revisited in her memories for the rest of her life. While she was at Mills College, Barbara followed the call of her faith and joined the Catholic church.

After college, Barbara taught small children at a convent school in San Francisco before joining her parents in State College, Pennsylvania; her father was teaching naval science at Penn State, and Barbara had the opportunity to go to graduate school there. She earned her master’s degree in history and began a brief but fulfilling career teaching high school in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, while she cared for her mother during her mother’s final years.

In the mid 1960s, Barbara moved into a studio apartment on East 36^th Street in New York City and began working nearby at the library at Sterling Drug.

To combat the loneliness of being a new arrival in a big city, one day Barbara joined a walking tour of Chelsea. A man on the tour, Jim Reich, started to talk to her, and then wouldn’t stop talking—he bought her a coffee, and then walked with her to the East side of town, and then bought her a drink, and then walked her home. She insisted that she did not take him seriously at first—she was certain that God would find her a Catholic man, and Jim was quick to inform her that he was Jewish—but they soon became inseparable and eventually she told him it was time to get married. They had a small wedding ceremony in the Bronx, bought an apartment together in Brooklyn Heights, and had a son, Daniel, followed a year and a half later by a daughter, Elizabeth.

What followed were some of the happiest years of Barbara’s life. She was in her element in her small apartment in Brooklyn, and wrote countless letters to her mother-in-law documenting Halloween costumes created, rounds of flu endured, snowsuits washed, and little dresses purchased, taken in, and then taken out again. The family moved to Larchmont in 1982, in pursuit of more space and good public schools, settling down on Coolidge Street in the house that became Barbara’s nest and her refuge for the rest of her life. “This is a good house,” she’d often say, looking around her, as she told the story of the difficult decision to leave Brooklyn, how she chose Larchmont because of her beloved Long Island Sound, and how after much searching she found a house with a backyard that was large enough for her children to run and play in.

At last, this was the home she stayed in, through her children growing up and leaving for college and finding their own city apartments, through her retirement, through the deaths of her son and then her husband—this was the place where she finally grew deep roots after a life of moving, and where she could always feel the presence of “the people who are no longer here,” as she sometimes said. This was the home where she devotedly looked after “my Jimmy,” where she lovingly tended her garden, where she installed a swing set for her kids and then took it down again as they became adults, and where in the last chapter of her life her daughter stopped in to see her almost daily, and where her beloved grandchildren could run up and down the stairs and have their turn in that big backyard.

Her deep sense of comfort in this home was complemented by the joy she found in her spiritual home: “the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church,” as she’d recite with a smile, and in particular at St. Augustine’s, about which her friends fondly remember her singing the 1960 song from Oliver: “Consider yourself—at home! / Consider yourself—one of the family.”

Home, faith, friends, and family: throughout her long life, those were the things Barbara found most precious.

May she rest in peace.