Hilda Farnum Nicoll

Hilda Katherine Farnum Nicoll died unexpectedly at her Portland home, Saturday evening, December 6, ending a life of loving partnership with her husband of 65 years, nurturing leadership and support in her immediate and extended family, challenging and generous service in the communities where she lived and warm friendships at home and abroad.

Hilda was born in Calais, Maine, August 4, 1927, the second daughter of Marlin D. Farnum and Melva Mann Farnum. When she was two weeks old the family left Maine for Japan, where her father was a missionary for the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society. She lived in Japan from October 1927 until November 1940, much of that time on an island in the Inland Sea. It was there she became a fluent Japanese speaker, a talent she retained into her senior years.

The looming war between Japan and the United States hastened the family's return to the United States. After short stays with relatives in New Hampshire and Maine they moved to Newton, Massachusetts, and then to Tenafly, New Jersey, where Hilda received her high school education.

In the summer of 1944 Hilda worked at Osgood's restaurant in Ocean Park, Maine where she met Don Nicoll, who worked in a boys' camp in Ocean Park. The next summer, when they returned to Ocean Park, they discovered they were "twins," born on the same day of the same year, and that each planned to attend Colby College, starting that fall.

Hilda and Don married in June 1949, just after both graduated from Colby, where Hilda majored in sociology and psychology.

Over the ensuing years, they made their home in central Pennsylvania, near Penn State University, New Jersey, Buckfield, Maine, Bethesda, Maryland, Washington, D.C., Dover, New Hampshire and Portland, Maine.

In addition to raising their family (Hugh, 1951, Jonathan, 1953, Melissa, 1956 and Jessica, 1959), Hilda was an activist advocate and a practical volunteer. She marched and picketed for civil rights and a more peaceful world, and put her principles to work as unpaid staff for Fair Housing in Washington D.C. She gave her children wings and was a devoted teacher, nurturing with consummate skill countless children in church schools and nursery schools. She served as a volunteer hospital nursing unit clerk, cared for a college student with severe physical disabilities, worked as an interviewer and board member for Project FEED, served on the Board of Managers at Seventy-Five State Street, and was a board member and volunteer for the Japan-America Society of Maine and the Maine-Aomori Sister-State program.

Throughout their marriage, Hilda was a strong partner. She had helped put Don through graduate school at Penn State by working as a librarian. Hilda's talents as a nurturing leader in her family were evident through the years when Don was busy and away much of the time as executive secretary to the Maine Democratic Party and aide to Congressman Frank Coffin and Senator Edmund Muskie. She managed their home with a marvelous combination of practicality and joie de vivre. She was the office manager for D & H Nicoll Associates, the program planning consulting firm she and her husband established after he retired from the Maine Medical Center.

In 1982 Hilda took Don on what they expected to be her one return and his one visit to the land of her youth, Japan. The next year, however, their son Hugh moved to Miyazaki, Kyushu, to teach. In subsequent years Hilda and Don visited Hugh's family, areas of Japan Hilda had not known before and, increasingly, Maine's sister state Aomori, where Hilda was an important good-will ambassador for the burgeoning relationship, a diplomatic effort enhanced by her hosting of Aomori and other Japanese visitors in Portland.

Her culinary skills were a delight to her immediate and extended families, her friends and guests. Her sensitivity and active caring expressed themselves in her many acts of kindness to family and others. She was the primary source of assistance for her parents in their late years and deeply involved in the same period with care for Don's parents.

Throughout her life she was known for her energy, her imagination and inventiveness, her dramatic flair and her spunk, overcoming post-diphtheritic paralysis in her childhood and coping with the long-term effects of that disease in her late years.

She leaves her husband and "twin" Don, sons Hugh of Miyazaki, Japan, Jonathan of Dedham, Maine, daughter Melissa and son-in-law Campbell Forbes of Allston, Massachusetts, daughter Jessica and her partner Barry Oreck of Brooklyn New York, her sister Elizabeth Hummer of Portland, sister Rosemary and brother-in-law Clifford Gilson of Penney Farms, Florida, grandchildren Laura Kreilkamp Nicoll, Siobhan Linden Forbes, Rufus Kreilkamp Nicoll, Caitlin Shion Nicoll, William Daisuke Nicoll, Owain Davie Forbes and Gabriella Ayano Nicoll, and seven nieces and nephews.

There will be a memorial service celebrating Hilda’s life December 27, 2014, 2:00 p.m., Allen Avenue Unitarian Universalist Church, 524 Allen Avenue, Portland.

In lieu of flowers, Hilda’s family suggests donations to the following:

> A2U2 Memorial Fund in memory of Hilda K. F. Nicoll, Allen Avenue Unitarian Universalist Church, 524 Allen Avenue, Portland, ME 04103

> Project FEED, 202 Woodford Street, Portland, ME 04103

> Donald and Hilda Nicoll Scholarship Fund, Edmund S. Muskie School of Public Service, University of Southern Maine, P.O. Box 9300, Portland, ME 04104-9300

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