We’re saddened to report the passing of Myrtle Council, an avid and knowledgeable local historian who was an honored guest at the grand opening of The John Updike Childhood Home in October 2021. She was 99.

Myrtle was a 1941 graduate of Shillington High School, and after serving in the Navy WAVES during WWII she worked at the Reading Eagle-Times, Jacobs Aircraft Engineering Co., and Edelman’s Law Office in Reading.

But Berks County knew her mostly from her extensive volunteerism and advocacy for the preservation of local history. The list of organizations she served is almost as long as her rich life. She was a member of the National Parliamentarians Association, the American Institute of Parliamentarians, Berks Unit of PAP, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the PA Federation of Women’s Clubs, Southeastern District of PFWC, Berks County Federation of Women’s Clubs, Women’s Club of Shillington, Federation of Past Presidents Club, and the Shillington/Mifflin Alumni Association, frequently serving as president or a board member of those organizations. She was also a lifetime member of the Immanuel UCC, Shillington, where she was a youth group leader, Altar Guild Chairman, founder/leader of the Shawl Ministry for 10 years, and a kitchen helper.

Her intersecting interests of Shillington High School, John Updike, and local history and its preservation led her to take an active role in passing on archival materials that the Shillington/Mifflin Alumni Association had acquired to the John Updike Childhood Home, where some items could be displayed and others catalogued and safely protected for the future. Items currently at the house museum—including Shillington H.S. pennants, pins, hats, athletic letters, and a student handbook—are on display because of Myrtle’s vision and dedication to preserving local history for future generations to understand and appreciate.

Inurnment, with full military honors, will take place in Fairview Cemetery, 375 New Holland Ave., Shillington, at 10 a.m. on Dec. 30, 2023. A celebration of life service will follow at 11 a.m. at Immanuel United Church of Christ, 99 S. Waverly St., Shillington. The family will receive friends immediately following services in the church fellowship hall.

Contributions in memory of Myrtle Council can be made to Immanuel UCC at the above address. Here is a link to the obituary where memories can be shared.

The society sends its deepest sympathies to Myrtle’s daughter, Elizabeth, and to the rest of the family. Myrtle will be missed, but her work lives on.

The society is saddened to report that Martha Ruggles (Bernhard) Updike died Monday, October 9, at the age of 85. Below is the obituary written by her sons from her first marriage, as well as an announcement sent to parishioners by Emmanuel Church in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts. She is pictured here on the steps of another church—Grace Lutheran, in Shillington, Pa.—in a photo taken by society member David Silcox.

Martha Ruggles (Bernhard) Updike, previously of Beverly Farms, MA, died on October 9 2023 in New York City at the age of 85 after suffering from dementia for several years. She was the widow of the author John Updike to whom she had been married for over 30 years when he died in 2009. Her previous marriage to Alexander Bernhard ended in divorce in 1974. Martha is predeceased by her parents Margaret Ruggles and Frederic Stanboro Ruggles and her brother Keith Ridgeway Ruggles. Born in Chicago in 1937, Martha was raised in Fairfield Connecticut before attending Cornell University and later obtaining her Masters in Education from Harvard University in 1964 and her Masters in Social Work from Simmons College in 1988. She subsequently worked at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston as a social worker in their inpatient psychiatric unit. A long-time resident of Boston’s North Shore, Martha was a member of Myopia Hunt Club and at the time of her death the Chilton Club. Martha was passionate about gardening, holding several positions with the Garden Club of America throughout her lifetime and was involved in numerous organizations including the Holland Dames, the Huguenot Society of America and the Mayflower Society. Martha was known for her no- nonsense Yankee approach to life and people, her work and her gardens. Her greatest happiness was the life she shared with her late husband John. Martha is survived by her four stepchildren, Liz Updike Cobblah, David Updike, Michael Updike and Miranda Updike, and three sons from her first marriage, John H. Bernhard II, Jason Ruggles Bernhard and Frederic (Ted) Ridgeway Bernhard. A memorial service will be held at a future date in Manchester MA.

The society extends its deepest sympathies to John, Jason, and Ted Bernhard, and to the stepchildren and grandchildren.

Former multi-sport athlete Richard “Dick” Rhoda died June 12, 2023 at the age of 92. Born in Shillington, he was the son of textile mill worker William “Wit” Rhoda and hospital administrator Kathryn Long.

At Shillington High School, Rhoda was on the varsity football, basketball, track, and swim teams. John Updike’s father, Wesley, coached the swim team and was an assistant coach on the football team, and Rhoda’s son, Jeff, recalled his father telling him that a “classmate, John Updike, would stop by his family home with his father to help count the concession stand proceeds after games.”

“My father had a Huck Finn childhood,” Jeff Rhoda said. “He hunted with his father and trapped muskrats before school and then sold them for 10 cents each.” The younger Rhoda also said his father “grew up in Amish country and enjoyed his scrapple and shoofly pie.” He added, “My parents rarely missed a happy hour at the end of the day. My father had a daily cigar.”

Rhoda later attended Albright College, where he was the starting point guard on the basketball team, after which he received a degree in pharmacy from Philadelphia Pharmaceutical (later Philadelphia College of the Sciences). He worked as a pharmacist for most of his life, and also coached youth football in his community. He is survived by his wife of 69 years, Irene McLaughlin, a retired Baltimore County Library administrator; two sons, Rich Rhoda of Centerville, Ohio and Jeff Rhoda of Baltimore; a daughter, Sharon Hovde of Madison, Wis.; six grandchildren and six great grandchildren. The John Updike Society offers their condolences.

A life celebration will be held August 8 on what would have been the couple’s 70^th wedding anniversary at a location to be announced.

Read the full obituary. 

A remarkable Berks County woman died on May 16, 2023. Ellen Lou Gallagher (Brownmiller) was a beloved teacher who touched many lives, but she was also a student, artist, musician, playwright, quilter, and “almost an astronaut when she was a Pennsylvania finalist for the Teacher in Space program in 1985,” according to her obituary.

Her son, Drew Gallagher, told The John Updike Society that Ellen had “three organizations that were very dear to her and one was the Updike Childhood Home.” In lieu of flowers, the family requested that donations be made to those three organizations: The Reading Symphony, The John Updike Childhood Home, or The Kurt Vonnegut Museum. “Or simply read a favorite book or listen to a show tune in her honor. Try to remember when love was an ember about to billow. When everything was beautiful and nothing hurt. And so it goes.”

Born in West Reading on July 1, 1941, Gallagher graduated from Millersville State with a degree in education and added a Master’s degree from Temple University years later. “Ultimately she landed at Lorane Elementary School in Exeter as a fifth grade teacher. Her students will remember the annual incubation projects, waiting for the chicks to hatch in the classroom, and they will not forget learning what a million something looked like when they collected that many aluminum can pull tabs over many more school years than anticipated. There was a large ceremony at Lorane to commemorate the millionth pull tab and photos were taken and published in The Reading Eagle [where her late husband, Charles Gallagher, was longtime editor] before the tabs were recycled.”

Gallagher spent summer 1981 teaching children on the island of Majuro in the Marshall Islands and was an inspiration for a character in the young adult novel Me and Marvin Gardens, written by one of her former students, A.S. King.

Perhaps most remarkably, when she retired she had two goals: “learn to quilt and to play the violin. She was successful at both. As a member of the Reading Philharmonic Orchestra, she played the violin until she was unable and then became the narrator for their concerts up until her death.”

The John Updike Society is touched that a person who loomed so large in so many lives thought enough of John Updike and our little childhood home museum to name us as a donation beneficiary. Even in death, she continues to make a difference and set an example. Our deepest sympathies go out to her sons Drew and Thomas, her daughter Julie Stern, and their families.

Emerson Gundy, known to John Updike Society members as Updike’s second cousin and classmate who graduated from Shillington High School in 1950, passed away on April 4, 2023. He was 90.

According to his obituary, Emerson graduated from Temple University, served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, worked for Conestoga Telephone Company, and was a U.S. Coast Guard Charter Captain who liked to fish on the Chesapeake Bay. A member of Robeson Evangelical Lutheran Church and Union Lodge No. 479 F&AM, Birdsboro, Emerson was also an avid hunter and private plane pilot.

From 1990-2014 Emerson and his wife, Marlene, owned the Updike family home in Plowville, and were enthusiastic and mindful caretakers of Updike’s legacy. They donated their papers (Emerson and Marlene Gundy Collection of John Updike Materials) to Alvernia University, and their collection of Updike books to The John Updike Childhood Home, where they are on display in the bedroom where Linda and Wesley Updike slept. Emerson specified that he wanted some of the books to be displayed so that Updike’s inscriptions could be seen, and the books will be rotated so that all of them can be viewed at some point.

When the society held their first conference in 2010, the Gundys graciously opened their home so that members could have a look inside the sandstone farmhouse where Linda Updike was raised and where she returned to live with the family when John was 13. Everyone who posed for a photo in front of the Gundys’ home will forever remember their generosity and geniality. Emerson’s passing leaves a hole in our hearts. On behalf of those and other members, we extend our heartfelt sympathies to Marlene and the family.

We are saddened to belatedly learn of the death of Lawrence R. Broer, who died at age 84 in his Tampa, Fla. home on Nov. 30, 2022. As his obituary notes, “He was an internationally acclaimed scholar of modern and postmodern literature,” and while he published extensively on Hemingway and Vonnegut, Updike society members know him from his edited collection of critical essays Rabbit Tales: Poetry and Politics in John Updike’s Novels (U. of Alabama,1998). Larry was also the author of Hemingway’s Spanish Tragedy (U. of Alabama, 1973), Sanity Plea: Schizophrenia in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut (U. of Alabama, 1989), and Vonnegut & Hemingway: Writers at War (U. of South Carolina, 2011). With Gloria Holland he edited Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice (U. of Alabama, 2004), and charter Updike Society members will remember that Larry served on the very first society-sponsored panel at the 2009 American Literature Association Conference in Boston.

Larry taught at the University of South Florida from 1965-2003, when he retired. At USF he received the Theodore and Vanette Askounes-Ashford Distinguished Scholar Award and the Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching. He was also a Fulbright fellow, lecturing at the University of Paris in 1981 and 1984, and from 2018-22 he was a Fulbright Specialist.

His academic friends might not know this, but Larry was also athletic, taking pride in being able to quarterback the USF Faculty Football Team and participate in senior softball leagues into his 80s.

The society extends its sympathies to his partner, Béatrice Frouté De Domec, sons Joshua and Wesley Broer, and stepson Ashkahn Ardalan. Academia has lost a powerful voice and a generous mentor to up-and-coming scholars.

We were saddened to learn of the death of John Updike Society member Richard Davison, who passed away peacefully at his home on Jan. 19, 2023. He was 88. Richard was a charter member of the society and attended the first four conferences in Reading, Pa., Boston, and Columbia, S.C. with his wife, Dr. Milena Davison.

Those who didn’t know him often did a double-take because of his slight resemblance to Updike, and he took delight in telling the story of when he first met Updike. The latter immediately saw the resemblance and joked that it was like looking into a mirror. They decided that Richard, who was shorter than the author, was “John Updike, Jr.”

Because of the resemblance, Richard, a professor emeritus at the University of Delaware, offered to read from Updike’s work at the society’s first conference in Reading. He thought it might be fun, and it was. As the featured reader for the closing dinner at Jimmie Kramer’s Peanut Bar Restaurant in Reading, which Updike frequented when he was a junior working as a copy boy at the Reading Eagle across the street, Richard read from Rabbit, Run and Updike’s writings about Shillington and Reading. Always willing to help, Richard donated to support the society’s mission and also moderated a conference session in Boston. He was the embodiment of the “gentleman scholar,” who enjoyed talking about literature and was always gracious.

In addition to his being active in the Updike society, the Legacy obituary noted that Davison was a past president of the Frank Norris Society and also a member of the Hemingway and Fitzgerald societies. He published on a wide range of authors, including Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Stephen Crane, Hart Crane, Fitzgerald, Robert Penn Warren, Steinbeck, Albee, Salinger, and Hemingway. A passionate theater-goer as well, he co-edited two books on theater with Jackson Bryer and shared his passions with students. He was honored in 2001 with the University of Delaware College of Arts and Science Teaching Award.

During a distinguished career Richard was also a visiting professor at Washington College and at universities in Essen and Cologne, Germany. Additionally, he directed the English Graduate Program at Seattle University during his tenure there, and in 1966 he hosted 39 episodes of a TV series on Literature and Life. The two naturally went together for Richard, and the Updike Society is richer for his having been a member. He will be missed, and we offer our deepest condolences to Milena and the couple’s three children and one grandchild.