Obituaries

“She was the strongest woman I ever met,” Jenna Vertullo’s mother, Gail Lia, said Tuesday of her daughter.

Joyce L. Coleman, a nurse’s aide and an expert scallop-shucker, died on Dec. 29 at home on Spring Lane in Sag Harbor. Her family said the cause was a pulmonary embolism. She was 62.

Ms. Coleman worked for many years taking care of residents at the Huntting Lane Rest Home in East Hampton Village. She later went to work at the Todd Nursing Home in Southampton, which became the Southampton Nursing Home.

Margaret Keller, the matriarch of an extended family and a charter member of the Montauk Fire Department’s Ladies Auxiliary, died of natural causes on Sunday at Southampton Hospital. She was 87 and had lived in the same house on South Delphi Street for more than 60 years.

Nancy Brunn, who taught art and a high school-level art history class at the Montauk School, died at home on Accabonac Road in East Hampton on Dec. 31. She was 67 and had primary progressive aphasia, a degenerative brain disease, her family said.

Susan Ellen Akin of Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., a part-time resident of Montauk until 2002, died of emphysema on Jan. 3 at Phelps Memorial Hospital in Sleepy Hollow. She was 78 and had been in declining health since 2007.

Known as Ellen, she was born on Dec. 9, 1936, in Charles Town, W.V., to Laurence W. Lloyd and Susan Ellen Jones Lloyd and grew up there, eventually attending Duke University in Durham, N.C. She married Robert M. Akin III on July 2, 1960, and they began coming to Montauk after their marriage. Mr. Akin died in 2002.

Sydney Steven Griffin, a longtime resident of Northwest Landing Road in East Hampton and a dedicated merchant seaman, died on Christmas Day at Southampton Hospital. He was 76 and had been in declining health for several years.

Tyler Robert Buckley, who was 22 years old, died at Southampton Hospital on Sunday evening after being found  without breath in his mother’s, Susan Buckley’s, house on Crystal Drive in East Hampton. He had been sick for several months, and his family believes he was suffering from pneumonia when he went to sleep and did not wake up. The cause of death is being investigated, but police said no foul play is suspected.

Yaeko Lawler, who lived in East Hampton with her husband, Thomas H. Lawler, in the late 1950s and early ’60s and kept a house here until the 1990s, died in Bowie, Md., on Dec. 22 after a long illness. She was 82.

Mrs. Lawler was born in Osaka, Japan, on Oct. 15, 1932, to Eitarou Yukawa and the former Ikuno Ohe. She grew up in Japan and was married in June 1956 to Mr. Lawler, an East Hampton native. The couple lived on Three Mile Harbor Road from 1957 to 1963, when they relocated to Bowie.

Margaret (Peggy) Keller, 87, of South Delphi  Street in Montauk died Sunday evening of natural causes at Southampton Hospital surrounded by her family. Family and friends have been invited to gather at the Yardley and Pino Funeral Home in East Hampton between 2 and 4 p.m. and 7 and 9 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 8. A funeral service will be held at St. Therese of Lisieux Catholic Church in Montauk at 11 a.m. on Friday, Jan. 9, with the Rev. Thomas Murray officiating.

A memorial service for Jeff Golub of New York City and Bridgehampton will be held Thursday at the Society for Ethical Culture at 2 West 64th Street in Manhattan at 1 p.m.

Mr. Golub, a jazz, blues, and rock guitarist with a long solo career and who also played with Rod Stewart, Tina Turner, Peter Wolf (of the J. Geils Band), John Waite, Vanessa Williams, Gato Barbieri, and Bill Evans, among many others, died on New Year's Day at home in New York.

He was 59 and had been diagnosed with progressive supranuclear palsy, a brain disorder.

Isabelle Ray Morgan, a lifelong East Hampton resident who helped baymen by opening shellfish at her shucking shack in Springs, died of pneumonia on Christmas Day at Southampton Hospital. She was 86.

Marianne Ajamy, an artist and designer, succumbed to leukemia on Saturday at her Hoppin Avenue house in Montauk. She was 66 and had been ill for a year.

Ms. Ajamy’s paintings had been exhibited on the East End, and a vase she had decorated, her “Butterfly Fantasy Vase,” was included in the book “The Painted Butterfly: 15 Painting Projects for Home Décor.” She also was known for painting children’s faces at birthday parties.

Robert Joseph Langs, a psychoanalyst and author of more than 40 books on psychiatry for professionals as well as the public, died of amyloidosis, a rare blood disease, at home in New York City on Nov. 8 at the age of 86.

An obituary in last week’s paper for Robert W. Mott, who was known as Buzzy, failed to include some of his survivors. In addition to his father, Harry L. Mott of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., his children, Christopher Mott of Venice, Fla., and Shelly Mott Fisher of Sarasota, Fla., and four grandchildren, Mr. Mott is also survived by his sister, June Bubka, and her husband, Tom Bubka, of East Hampton, who took charge of his care for 30 years following a traumatic brain injury in 1985, and their daughter, Jennifer Bubka of Brooklyn.

Robert T. Snyder, a labor lawyer and former judge with the National Labor Relations Board, died in his sleep at his Sag Harbor house on Dec. 10, after returning from a rehearsal for the annual holiday concert of the Sag Harbor Community Band, with which he played clarinet.  He was 84 and had not been ill.

Mr. Snyder, who also lived in New York City and spent the month of January in Sanibel, Fla., “was passionate about his music, and passionate about the law,” his wife of 16 years, Elaine Congress, said.

Alan York, an optometrist with a practice in a building he owned at 1 Main Street in East Hampton Village and a founding member of the Jewish Center of the Hamptons, died on Nov. 29 at Southampton Hospital. He was 89.

He counted among his patients the artist Willem de Kooning, with whom he spent hours discussing the old masters while watching him paint. Understanding how de Kooning painted helped him make glasses suitable for both his close-up and faraway work.

Frederick Joseph Knapp, a singer and musician who had a career in industrial shows and, with his wife, the former Penny Leka, later founded a company that trained businesspeople in public speaking, presentation, and dress, died of a heart attack in Northport on Nov. 13 at the age of 84. The couple recently sold a house in East Hampton they had owned for 24 years.

Harold Maurice Wit, a lawyer, poet, and longtime resident of East Hampton, died on Dec. 14 at his house in Santa Fe, N.M., after having had several strokes. He was 86.

Mr. Wit was an attorney with the Manhattan firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and was formerly managing director of the investment banking firm Allen & Company. He was also on the board of directors of Toys “R” Us, and M.C.I, a telecommunications company. He had established a lecture series, “Living a Spiritual Life in a Secular World,” at the Harvard Divinity School.

Robert W. (Buzzy) Mott, a member of East Hampton High School’s class of 1967, and the survivor of a traumatic brain injury in 1985, died just before midnight on Dec. 8, succumbing to complications of pneumonia at the Richmond University Medical Center on Staten Island. He had never fully recovered from the 1985 accident and had been institutionalized since then. He was 66 years old.

Arthur Ronald Fisher, who worked in maintenance for 10 years at Hither Hills State Park in Montauk and as a chef in that hamlet and in East Hampton for 28 years before that, died at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Md., on Monday. He was 72 and had been ill with leukemia for several months.

Mr. Fisher lived in Montauk for 31 years prior to moving to Springs-Fireplace Road in East Hampton seven years ago. According to his son Art Fisher of Reston, Va., he loved to go fishing with his family and “was a phenomenal wrestler as he was growing up.”

Morris Bradt Jr. of Amagansett and Manhattan, a retired management consultant, died on Dec. 6 at his home in the city. He was 92 and had been ill with cancer for a year.

Edward Hannibal, a novelist and advertising executive, died of lung cancer at Southampton Hospital on Saturday after a short illness. He was 78.

A graveside service for Thomas O. Conklin of Bridgehampton will be held on Dec. 20 at 2 p.m. at Cedar Lawn Cemetery in East Hampton. Mr. Conk­lin died on Nov. 26 at the age of 83.

Lammott Walter Cottman, known to most as Cott, died of a stroke in New York City on Nov. 19, a day before his 72nd birthday.

Mr. Cottman was a longtime summer resident of Azurest in Sag Harbor, where he stayed with his wife and family at her parents’ house. His wife of 50 years, the former Andrea Howard, was the president of the Azurest Association off and on for many years.

Muriel L. Forsberg split her teenage years between Sayville and Montauk. Her father was a fisherman, and when he was working in the summer and fall, the family lived in Montauk in a house not far from the docks and she attended East Hampton High School.

Before Kathleen Ann Aufrecht and her husband, William Aufrecht, started Bill’s Pool Service in 1991, she was a high school home economics teacher at North Babylon High School. The couple bought their house in East Hampton 10 years earlier and decided to retire here, but had divided their time between East Hampton and Marco Island in Florida since 2004.

Ms. Aufrecht died there, surrounded by family, on Nov. 13. She was 67 and had metastic breast cancer for eight years.

Kenneth Glen Rea of Church Lane in Springs, a World War II veteran of the Navy Seabees who served for 12 years on the executive board of American Legion Post 419 in Amagansett, died on Nov. 25 at Southampton Hospital after a fall in which he suffered a broken hip. He was 88.

Lewis Zacks, a much-admired artist who lived in Springs, died on Nov. 16, a day after his 83rd birthday, at New York Presbyterian Hospital, following complications of a failed surgery.

He was born in Taunton, Mass., the only son of Etta Hoberman and Robert Zacks. At the age of 5, he could draw anything his mother placed in front of him. When he was in middle school, a teacher who thought his talent remarkable gave up her Saturdays to drive him to Providence so that he could study at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Richard Douglas Carlson, a naval architect who had trained race horses and designed sailboats for ocean racing, died of  heart attack on Nov. 24 at the Hamptons Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing in Southampton following a six-month illness. He was 90 and a resident of Sag Harbor.

Thomas O. Conklin was born and raised at Breeze Hill Farm in Bridgehampton’s Scuttlehole area, and after graduating from high school in 1949 and earning an agriculture degree from Cornell University in 1953, he returned home to join his father and uncle growing potatoes.