Timothy A Cole

Timothy Cole of New York City passed away Thursday at age 87 after an evening with family and close friends. He died from advanced lung cancer and before the slow trek of Alzheimer’s was able to steal his memories or vibrant personality.

Born in Philadelphia, PA, the eldest child in a Quaker household to Orlando Cole, cellist of the Curtis String Quartet and renowned teacher, and Rosemond Adams of Salem, MA, pianist and activist.

Tim attended Drexel University and served in the Air Force from 1956-60 in Western Germany where he taught mathematics and analyzed aerial photographs. With his honorable discharge and a degree in electrical engineering, he started a career at Columbia Records where he became a pioneer in the cassette tape industry and patented a novel type of stylus. He and Carol met at a Christmas party at The New School of Music where she studied cello and they married in the summer of 1965.

Tim traveled extensively for work in the 1970s and ‘80s, starting a high-speed tape-duplication company, MTI, with a global customer base. The family moved to Montclair, New Jersey in 1976 where Tim worked with a parent volunteer group on school integration and was a member of the St. John’s Episcopal Church choir. In 1983 Tim began working as a systems engineer for Bell Laboratories in the exploding field of communications computing, where he helped launch the first AT&T “smart telephone” complete with a touch screen. In 1994, he earned a Master’s in Computer Science from Stevens Institute of Technology, and after retiring in 1998, taught computer programming at Montclair State University and Essex Community College for several years.

Tim was a passionate audiophile. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of classical music and was conversant in most other genres. He was a classically trained flutist and loved playing with Carol as well as his mother-in-law, Louise, an accomplished pianist. For his 75th birthday Carol commissioned a string quartet from Missy Mazzoli, which the Kronos Quartet played in their living room to an audience of family and friends.

Both before and after their retirements, Tim and Carol shared several decades of world travel and summer cycling. Moving back to New York City in 2006, they continued a lifetime of cultural patronage, often in the company of their dear friends the Cores and the Berkvists. Tim conquered many NYT crosswords over his lifetime and, most recently, the companion puzzles. He easily spotted the pangram until the last weeks of his life.

A loving father and grandfather, Tim took great joy in teaching the mechanics of baseball and braiding, building dollhouses, dioramas and desktops, and soldering repurposed PCs. Notably, he was the co-director of Camp Napapana for his grandkids each summer in the Berkshires, and, after some wrestling with his nautical ambitions, settled in to become Captain of “Whirlaway,” a temperamental pontoon boat on Lake Onota.

Above all, he will be remembered as a generous optimist who happily gave of his time, treasure, and expertise to many people and causes. He was comfortable in who he was and rarely met someone with whom he could not find a mutual topic of interest. He possessed a remarkable memory and famously never forgot a meal. He was a romantic aesthete and a tender-heart; easily brought to tears listening to a piece of music he loved or reading a birthday card.

He is survived by his wife Carol, sister Debbie and brother David, daughters Vanessa (Jim Barnett) and Alexandra (Emilio Spadola) and grandchildren Audrey, Ella, Bruno, and Orlando.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to City Harvest or Coalition for the Homeless, in honor of the causes Tim cared most about.