Barbara Cooley McNamee Dudley

Rensselaerville-Community leader and life-long Capital District resident Barbara Cooley McNamee Dudley died peacefully Saturday at the age of 91 at her home in Rensselaerville, the village whose character, traditions and institutions she had helped define for over 70 years. The cause of death was a brain tumor, which became apparent suddenly in mid-September following spells of dizziness. Since then, she hosted what was a nearly continuous house party, with dinners often seating a dozen or more at table, as she gathered her family and friends to share in the celebration of her life. “Usually people wait until some one dies to hold the wake. But I want to go to mine,” she said on several occasions. “So I’m having it right now!” Dudley’s life was one of continual enterprise and reinvention. Over the course of her long life, she was a journalist, a political activist, a second-hand and rare book dealer, a university trustee, an investment banker, and in the final decades of her life, a leading citizen of Rensselaerville, devoting herself to the practical and personal welfare of the village and those who live there. Still, it was her family that was the true center of her life. She was married and widowed twice: first in 1942 to Daniel Vincent McNamee Jr., a lawyer and president of the First Albany Corporation, who died in 1977; and second, in 1982, to architect George Austin Dudley, who died in 2005. She and Dan McNamee had four sons, and two daughters, one of whom died as a small child. However that was just the beginning: In addition to her own children, she and Dan McNamee also helped raise three nieces, and after her marriage to George Dudley, his four children and their families also became enfolded into the family circle. Dan McNamee once commented that managing their large household was equivalent to running a small business, which may have been an understatement. Dudley was born on August 27, 1920, the day the 19th Amendment establishing the women’s right to vote took effect. She felt this coincidence as providential; a graduate of the Albany Academy for Girls and Bryn Mawr College, she was a life long feminist and particularly in her later years, became a mentor to many younger women, offering a generous ear and no-nonsense advice many describe as pivotal in their lives. A number were also part of her women’s tennis circle, nearly all decades younger, who struggled to match her energy and remained mystified that she could still outsmart them at the net. The first female “copy boy” on the Albany Times Union, Dudley became a journalist in Washington DC during World War II, covering developments in the rapidly changing aeronautics industry. However, like many women, she was forced to give up her job to a returning GI. Moving back to Albany, she became a coordinator of the presidential campaigns of Adlai E. Stevenson in both 1952 and 1956, a founder of the World Affairs Council and active in the League of Women Voters. In the 1960s, she became the first woman elder of the First Presbyterian Church in Albany, joining Rev. Robert C. Lamar on the Civil Rights March on Washington in 1962. She also launched an annual second-hand book sale to raise money for scholarships for Bryn Mawr College, which soon evolved into a permanent shop that thrived into the new Millennium. Along the way, she became a licensed appraiser of rare books and an acknowledged expert on paper and bindings. Following the death of Dan McNamee, she joined First Albany Corporation, passing three New York Stock Exchange licensing exams within 18 months, and serving as an active Chairman of the Board until her retirement at the age of 70. Also a director of Fleet Bank, she was one of only four women in America serving as senior executives of a New York Stock Exchange member firm. Her youngest son, Giles McNamee, joined her for the prep classes, and worried she would be unnerved by some of the biz slang that tended to be a tad course. “Spreads and straddles? No problem,” he remembered. “She didn’t bat an eyelash.” After the “heart-breaking” early death of Dan McNamee from cancer, her remarriage was yet another reinvention, and what she described as a “true love match.” With George Dudley, she traveled widely to Europe, the Middle East and the Orient, donning a Burka in Kuwait and a bamboo construction helmet in Shanghai. With all the architectural wonders, she remembers being appalled by the restrictions on women, which in Saudi Arabia required an original copy of their marriage license to share a room and excluded her from the hotel swimming pool. Together, Barbara and George Dudley planned additions and improvements to Hickory Hill, the farm she had inherited from her parents, George and Myra Cooley, and worked to get funding for badly-needed repairs to the village water system and persuade the NYS Department of Transportation to build a graceful new bridge across the Ten Mile Creek, in keeping with the setting. Perhaps closest to her heart was the Presbyterian Church, which had been at the center of her summer life in the village since they moved there in 1937. With a strong intellectual tradition, ministers used the Rensselaerville pulpit as a forum for ideas, and over time Barbara Dudley took over responsibility for filling the roster of extraordinary visiting preachers each summer. She used the themes and even the choices – that included blacks, women, gays, Catholics, Jews and more recently Muslim theologians – as an opportunity to push for social change. In the last year of her life, she and her childhood friend Time Magazine researcher Nancy Chase undertook the challenge of writing a history of the Rensselaerville Presbyterian Church, whose congregation dates back to 1792, finding rich, previously untapped sources, that grew into a fascinating and detailed portrait, with an “iconic role in the life of a small American town.” A draft of the manuscript was completed in the last week of her life, edited and bound and put in her hand on the day she died. “Now I can go,” she told a friend. “Everything is moving along as it should.” Calling hours will be Monday December 19, 2011 4pm - 7pm at the family home, Hickory Hill, in Rensselaerville and Tuesday December 20, 2011 4pm - 8pm at 34 Willett Street, Albany. The funeral will be Wednesday 12/21 - 11am at the First Presbyterian Church 362 State Street (corner of Willett St), Albany. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Rensselaerville Presbyterian Church – Steeple Fund, P.O. Box 47, Rensselaerville, New York, 12147. Barbara C.M. Dudley is survived by her sisters Dorothy Cooley Mulleneaux Beal of Fairfield Iowa, Janet Cooley Sloss of Gloucestershire England, and Robin Cooley Krivanek of Tampa Florida; by her four sons, Daniel V. McNamee, III, of Rensselaerville, George C. McNamee of Albany, Roger B. McNamee of Woodside California, and Giles W. McNamee of Boston, and her daughter, Dardis McNamee of Vienna Austria; by her nieces Clare Yates of Albany, and Lauree Hickok of Queechy Lake; and by her step children George B. Dudley of West Haven , Sally Dudley of Palo Alto, John Dudley of Short Beach, Connecticut and Samuel W. Dudley III of Rensselaerville. To leave the family a special message on their guest book, obtain directions or memorial card, or share a photo or E-card with them, please visit www.McveighFuneralHome.com.

Tributes

Barbara Cooley McNamee Dudley

August 27, 1920 - December 17, 2011