Edwin P Varley
Edwin Pierce Varley was born on 28 September 1927 in Brighton, Massachusetts, the oldest son of Edwin Clement Varley and Margaret Eleanor Boughan. He grew up at Point Shirley, the seaside end of Winthrop, where the family lived at 89 Taft Avenue, and he went to Winthrop High School. His sister was Pauline Frances, later Mrs. Houlihan, and his brother David A. Varley.
The stories he told about his teenage jobs were remembered at his death: his "long Coal Shoveling days" at the Deer Island water treatment works, "catching leather soles, right side, left side, off the conveyor belts in Boston's Leather District, for pennies", and coaxing the fishing trawlers, dressed in his church clothes on Easter Sunday, with "hey, can you throw me a Cod fish, sir." He enlisted in the Navy before he had finished high school and served in the Second World War. He was on the Winthrop Transcript's Winthrop High School list of June 1945 and graduated in 1946. He served again in the Korean War.
Through the Navy's V-12 College Training Program, which sent officer candidates to civilian colleges at the government's expense, he studied at Tufts College and took a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering in 1951. He worked briefly for Goodyear Tire and Rubber at Akron, Ohio, and in 1952 began his career at Grain Dealers Mutual in Indianapolis as a special agent and loss prevention engineer, the man who inspects insured property and tells the owner how to cut the risk of fire and accident. He joined Industrial Risk Insurers in 1970 and retired in 1992.
He met Barbara D. Long of Watertown while roller skating at Revere Beach, at a Sadie Hawkins skate; it was love at first sight for him, his family said. They married in the spring of 1953 at Sacred Heart Church, Watertown, Rev. James F. Lally officiating, in a single-ring ceremony. His brother David was best man, and the ushers were Walter Williams of Saugus and Charles Walsh of Watertown. The reception was at the Hotel Beaconsfield and the honeymoon in Miami. Their son Paul was born at New Haven on 22 May 1957, and three daughters followed: Judith-Anne, Barbara-Jean and Mary-Patrice. In 1956 the couple's love of the water took them to Madison, Connecticut, where they settled in the Lee Manor Association, a shore community that still had party lines and only a rural free delivery address. Paul died on 15 October 1977, aged twenty.
In Madison he sang in the St. Margaret's Church choir for more than sixty years, from the weekend of President Kennedy's funeral in November 1963, and after retirement in barbershop quartets and the City of the Elms Barbershop Chorus in New Haven. After a health scare in 1986 he took up rowing. He competed at the C.R.A.S.H.-B. indoor rowing sprints in Boston for more than twenty years, won the British Indoor Rowing Championship for lightweights aged 75 to 79 in 2002, and logged more than 55 million meters on the machine. "Those on the Shoreline all knew the quiet man constantly rowing." He and Barbara travelled to Hawaii, Ireland and Bermuda and wherever the family lived.
Edwin Varley died at home in Madison on 27 November 2023, aged 96, with his family beside him, after more than seventy years of marriage. His grandson Christopher Edwin Glisson and his sister Pauline had died before him. Calling hours were at the Swan Funeral Home on 2 December, followed by a Mass of Christian Burial at St. Margaret's Church, and he was buried in West Cemetery, Madison, beside Paul. His stone reads "WONDERFUL HUSBAND DAD & GRANDFATHER." His family's farewell: "Edwin carried himself with Dignity and Grace, he was a true gentleman, rarely seen today."
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Researched October 2026. Cite: Heirology, "Edwin P Varley (1927-2023)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/edwin-p-varley-1927-2023-945cff.