Three and a half years ago The John Updike Society lost contact with James Yerkes, well known to Updike scholars as the editor-publisher of The Centaurian newsletter. Now we are saddened to report that we have learned from Dave Lull, who served as Yerkes’ assistant for many years, that Yerkes passed away.

Lull managed to track down Yerkes’ daughter, Janet Winslow, who responded in an email, “I’m sorry to tell you that my father died in November 2018. My father fell and broke his pelvis on 10/31/17, and we moved him and my mother to assisted living in Indianapolis one month later. Unbeknownst to us at the time, he had a form of Parkinson’s that impacted both his physical and cognitive ability fairly quickly and significantly during his last year.”

For many years before the society was formed, The Centaurian served to unite academics and writers who were interested in the life, works, and legacy of John Updike. For his important and groundbreaking service to Updike studies, Yerkes was honored in 2010 as the first recipient of The John Updike Society’s Distinguished Service Award (pictured above). Due to his inability to travel, the award was presented to him on the society’s behalf by Rich Boulet, then director of the Blue Hill Public Library, a literary center in Maine near Yerkes’ home.

“I remember when Dad received this–he was so appreciative,” Winslow said. “My father’s Updike work was incredibly important and meaningful to him and provided a wonderful ‘place’ to put his energy and intellect in the years following retirement.”

Yerkes, Professor of Religion and Philosophy Emeritus and former provost of Moravian College, edited the important collection of essays on John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace, published by Eerdmans in December 1999. We will miss him.

The obituary for Mary Pennington (Updike) Weatherall published by the Local Ne.ws reports that a celebration of her life will be held at First Church in Ipswich, UCC, One Meetinghouse Green, on Saturday, May 5 at 2 p.m. And there is much to celebrate. John Updike Society members know only that she was an artist and a supporter of her first husband, John Updike, who read his drafts and gave him advice, and that she continued to support him after he died by graciously backing the society by contributing to the restoration of The John Updike Childhood Home, participating in two conferences (shown in photo below at the Plowville home with scholar Don Greiner and husband Robert Weatherall), and assisting scholars with their projects.

But there was much more to Mary, as the obituary notes:

In addition to raising her four children and continuing to paint, Mary served on Ipswich’s Fair Housing Committee, “working to ensure that all who wanted to move to, and purchase property in Ipswich, were welcome to do so. She was active in the civil rights movement and, in 1965, flew to Alabama with fellow Ipswich residents, the late Rev. Goldthwaite Sherrill, William Wasserman, and the late Sally Landis Wasserman, to participate in one of the three Selma to Montgomery marches.”

Mary was a local activist as well, working in the 1990s with second husband Robert Weatherall and “the town, the Greenbelt Association, the Nichols family of Essex, and with a substantial monetary contribution of their own, helped make it possible to purchase 10 acres of open meadow above their house. Now known as The Nichols Field, it is an invaluable addition to the open spaces of Ipswich, enjoyed by joggers, dog walkers, fishermen, and romantically inclined teenagers, who walk the mile down Labor-in-Vain Road to enjoy the field overlooking the Ipswich River.”

Mary’s “landscapes of Ipswich, the obituary reports, “were avidly purchased and collected, and a large retrospective of her work was held at the Schlsingler Library at Radcliffe College [her alma mater] in the year 2000.”

Mary, the daughter of Rev. Leslie Talbot Pennington and Elizabeth Entwistle Daniels, a teacher of Latin, was born in Braintree, Mass. on Jan. 26, 1930, and “raised in Cambridge and Chicago,” according to the obituary. “She married John Hoyer Updike on June 26, 1953, and they spent their honeymoon in a small cottage behind the Goodale Apple Orchard on Argilla Road, loaned to them by a family friend.” After living in New York City they moved to Ipswich in 1957 and spent nearly two decades on the North Shore together. Their marriage, which was famously chronicled in The Maples Stories, ended with a “no-fault” divorce in March 1976.

According to the obituary, weeks after celebrating her 88th birthday Mary “caught a bad cold, which in turn led to pneumonia. When they learned of her illness, all seven of her grandsons and a wife, Anoff and Jaime Cobblah, Kwame Cobblah, Wesley Updike, Trevor Updike, Sawyer Updike, Kai Freyleue, and Seneca Freyleue, arrived from various corners of New England to be with her. Her great grandson, Weston Scott Kofi Cobblah, was also there with his parents.

“She is survived by her four children, Elizabeth Cobblah, David Updike, Michael Updike, and Miranda Updike; their spouses, Tete Cobblah, Wambui Githiora Updike, Jeffrey Kern; her three step-children, Robert, Alexander, and Helen Weatherall and their spouses.”

Condolences may be sent by visiting www.whittier-porter.com. In lieu of flowers, contributions in her memory may be made to the Ipswich Refugee Program, P.O. Box 285, Ipswich, MA  01938-9998.

“Mary Pennington Updike Weatherall, 88, an artist and first wife of John Updike” (Boston Globe)

All of us at The John Updike Society were saddened to see the notice that Michael Updike just posted on Facebook that his mother, Mary Pennington (Updike) Weatherall, has died. Mary, John Updike’s first wife and the mother of his four children, was a supporter of the society from the very beginning. She donated money to help us restore the childhood home, donated objects for display that once belonged to Updike, took part in a family panel at the first conference in Reading, Pa., and even welcomed into her home all who attended the second conference in Boston.

We offer our sympathies to the family but share in the feeling of tremendous loss. All who were privileged to meet and spend any time with Mary know how warm and kind and generous she was, and how helpful she has been to Updike scholars over the years. She will be sorely missed, and our hearts go out to her children, Elizabeth Cobblah Updike, David Updike, Michael Updike, and Miranda Updike and their families.

We will post more information as we receive it.