Raymond Spong

East Lyme — Raymond Albert Spong, 93, of Boston Post Road, East Lyme, died Sunday, July 30, 2017, at Bridebrook Healthcare.

I was born of the union of Boise Penrose Spong and Anna (nee Sollman) Spong in Chicago on Jan. 14, 1924, my father’s birthday. He often said it wasn’t the kind of present he expected. My wife, Neldred (nee Kesner), predeceased me on Dec. 23, 1992, and likewise, a late-in-life longtime companion, Miriam Lukas, of Old Lyme and Schuylerville, N.Y., died in May 2004. Her two daughters and three grandchildren survive. To my knowledge, I am the last Spong in my father’s lineage which I have traced back to 1825, a date beyond which I couldn’t find any more census information.

After 35 years as a mathematical analyst in the R&D Department at Electric Boat, I retired in 1991. Prior to that, I worked for five years at the former Underwater Sound Laboratory, coming there directly from graduate school at Northwestern University where I earned both undergraduate and graduate degrees in mathematics and astronomy. At Northwestern I was elected to Pi Mu Epsilon, a mathematics honorary, and joined both the Mathematical Association of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. I was elected a fellow of the AAAS 10 years later and in 1999 honored as a 50-year life member. Also in 1999, I was honored as one of 18 members of the Math Association with 50 or more years of membership.

I was, up until my death, an inveterate collector — a hobby, or habit, or fetish that began in the 1930s with stamps and then with electric trains, also before WWII. Collecting took a back seat during the war, and for the years in college after the war. Incidentally, I graduated from high school two months after Pearl Harbor (Chicago had mid-year graduations in those years), so except for a brief beginning in college everything was put on hold. The high school was Albert G. Lane Technical High School, which at that time had an average daily enrollment of 6,000 (yes, thousand) boys; my graduating class had 300. I have been as proud of graduating from that school as most anything else I have done. A year later I was in the service and I often say I missed the war because I spent three years in Hawaii in the Army Air Force repairing teletype machines, which wasn’t the worst duty I could have had. I wound up as the technical equivalent of a staff sergeant.

After marrying Neldred in 1948, and finishing graduate school, I (we) moved to Connecticut and settled here in 1951. In recent years, friends have asked if I have lived here all my life. I used to answer, “Not yet.” Now that answer won’t do.

The collecting bug reared its ugly head again shortly after we bought our home in East Lyme when I started to build a toy train layout in the basement. Some years later I discovered the Train Collectors Association and the Antique Toy Collectors of America, both national organizations with international members. I became the first two-term president of the toy group and continued to serve on its Board of Directors until my death. I had also been on the editorial committee of the club when it published several monographs about antique toys, one of which I wrote in its entirety. Neldred and I published several articles about toys in a collector’s magazine, wrote several book reviews for that magazine, and eventually compiled and self-published a bibliography of books on toys, trains and related subjects. After Neldred died I didn’t have the heart to continue with toys and trains, so I amassed a small array of antique teapots.

To those whose friendship I have treasured all these years I ask, humbly, if you want to remember me make a small donation to Hospice of SECT. And to those readers of this, my last publication, who have now, or have in the past, suffered some serious illness, know that I survived cancer in 1953, so there is hope for all. And so I say, since all good things must come to an end, FAREWELL and toodle-oo to one and all.

A graveside service will be held at 11 a.m. on Thursday, Aug. 3, 2017, in East Lyme Cemetery, East Lyme.

A great deal of thanks to the entire staff of Bridebrook for their patience and great care of Raymond. A special thanks to Masonicare Hospice for providing exceptional care in his last days.