John William Quinn, 62, died on Friday, September 30, 2016 when his tremendous heart could take no more.
Born in Indiana, Pennsylvania, on May 5, 1954, John was raised in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, where his parents ran the Sewickley News, which delivered papers to the entire town and served warm coffee and conversation from its storefront on Beaver Street.
From an early age, John spread love to everyone around him, especially to those who lacked it. He began as a child with Norman Ford, an elderly and bachelor veteran of the First World War who John brought home to lunch one day and who ended up staying with the Quinn family for twenty years. Norman was the first in a large collection of people that John drew to him through his persistence, sense of humor, generosity, and empathy. That collection grew when he left for Westminster College, where he earned his bachelor’s degree, and when he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease at age nineteen. During his radiation treatments, he became a fixture in the cancer ward at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, bonding with people many generations older than him. It grew further and deeper still when he returned to Sewickley, setting aside professional ambitions in art and automotive design after the sudden death of his father. John ran the store with his mother and cared for his younger brother Bob, who suffered from schizophrenia, while renewing friendships in the town where he grew up.
Perhaps most meaningfully, John’s collection of beloved people grew in 1979 when he met Lucia Luce while attending the Sewickley Presbyterian Church. John and Lucia began dating in 1980 while leading the junior high and senior youth groups and serving as a deacon and an elder respectively. They married in 1984 and moved to Massachusetts in 1986. They lived in Danvers and Concord, where they welcomed their children Will and Emma into their lives. During that time, John felt called to the ministry and enrolled in Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He worked as a pastoral intern in the burn unit of the Mass General Hospital, brought his family to cook and play boardgames with homeless men at the Kingston House shelter in Boston, and served for several years as the minister of pastoral care at Trinitarian Congregational Church in Wayland, Massachusetts.
In 2008, he completed that degree in Christian counseling, seventeen busy years later. During that time, John suffered a heart attack and a spinal tumor; moved to Chatham, NJ with his family; served as a deacon at the Presbyterian Church of New Providence; cared for Will and Emma; and supported Lucia – the “smartest person I know,” in his words – while she worked hard and sometimes far away. He bonded with and cared for countless people during and since that time: friends in his cardiac rehabilitation program; Will’s and Emma’s classmates and their parents; neighbors in Chatham and Princeton, New Jersey, and Chatham and Boston, Massachusetts; fellow volunteers on trips to Mexico and New Orleans; patients and caregivers at the hospitals where he volunteered with those stricken with cancer; his father-in-law, mother-in-law, mother, sister, and brother-in-law; his caregivers as he battled leukemia and numerous complications over the past year, which he had largely conquered; and, of course, Lucia, Will, and Emma. John will be remembered for the lives he touched with an abiding faith and a deep, quiet love, which sought to listen and to put others first always. As the inscription on the inside of his wedding ring – drawn from 1 John 4:19 – reads, “We love because He first loved us.”
John will also be remembered for his many other wonderful qualities and passions. He was an avid collector of model cars, many of which he assembled by hand, traded with friends, and sold to private collectors through a small business he began in his basement in Danvers. (He also collected a few full-scale ones, at times to Lucia and his children’s chagrin.) He was an artist, who took beautiful photos of his family and auto racing, drew in charcoal, and painted with watercolors. He enjoyed learning, read to his children for hours, and browsed away countless Friday evenings with them at Barnes & Noble and Borders. He was quick with gag gifts, puns, word games, and practical jokes, including one infamous incident where he wrapped Lucia’s kitchen sprayer with a rubberband. He loved road trips and thought nothing of piling his daughter and three of her friends into his car to drive them nine hours to Cedar Point, Ohio to indulge their passion for rollercoasters. He loved all music, particularly rock ‘n’ roll, and was generous with his vinyl records, practice space for his son’s band, and concert tickets. With his children and their friends, he went to see Jethro Tull, the Grateful Dead, U2, the Rolling Stones, Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Kansas, the Eagles, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and Jars of Clay, among many others. He traveled widely with Lucia, Will, and Emma, but was just as content to sit quietly on the porch of the Quinn family’s home on Cape Cod and enjoy a quiet breakfast at the local diner. Most of all, he gloried in the triumphs of his wife and children and provided them unconditional support in their hardest moments. His love sought to bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, and endure all things. And it does.
He leaves behind his wife Lucia Luce Quinn, of Boston, MA; his son Will Quinn, of Washington, D.C.; his daughter, 1stLt Emma Quinn, USMC, of Okinawa, Japan; his mother-in-law, Lucia Luce, brother-in-law, Rich Rodgers, sister-in-law, Donna Penna Justice, and countless friends and family members. He is predeceased by his mother and father, Helen and Bill Quinn; his father-in-law and brother-in-law, Dick and Rob Luce; his older sister, Susan Quinn Rodgers, and his younger brother, Robert Kane Quinn.
A worship service in his memory will be held on Saturday, October 8 at 11am at Trinitarian Congregational Church in Wayland, MA. Please share your memories of John with us at 21 Father Francis Gilday Street, #206, Boston, MA 02118. In lieu of flowers, the family sincerely requests that donations be made to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in memory of John and in tribute to his tireless caregivers, Dr. Charles Morris, Dr. Ann LaCasce, Dr. Patrick O’Gara, Dr. Daniel DeAngelo, and Susan Buchanan, P.A.-C. Please select “Family Wishes” at www.dana-farber.org/gift. Donations will go toward Hodgkin’s lymphoma research.