Mary Louise Hamill

Mary Lou (Stewart) Hamill died peacefully at 2:30am, October 26, 2020 in Orlando, Florida, following a stroke. She was 92 years old. She is survived by her husband of 65 years, Thomas Hamill, her daughter Cynthia (Dulany/Hamill) Hardy, her son Thomas James Hamill, and her beloved grandson Ira Hardy.
Mary Lou was born at the end of the Roaring Twenties, January 18, 1928, to James and Louise Stewart, of Oxford, MD. She and her sister, Cindy, spent their childhoods on a farm across the road from her grandparents, helping in the garden, with the chickens, and in her grandfather's dairy barn. In 1940, when Mary Lou was 12, she took her Jersey heifer, Maybelle, to the Jersey Cattle Show in Easton, MD, competed against the 4H boys, took grand champion, and went home with a handful of ribbons and the $150 prize.
In the early 1940s, the family moved to Salisbury, MD, where Mary Lou went to Wicomico High School and met her high school sweetheart, John Dulany. She became interested in sewing and fashion and, with John, took up sailing. After high school, she attended Salisbury State Teacher's College, then, in 1949, graduated from Drexel Institute of Technology in Fashion Design, after an apprenticeship in clothing design in New York.
She returned to Salisbury, where she and John found a derelict '20s era yacht, the Sapphire, and began to restore it. They were married in Annapolis in March, 1950; their daughter, Cindy Lou, was born the following November. They separated in 1953, Mary Lou returning to Drexel to work on a Masters in Home Economics and John piloting the Sapphire down the Inland Passage to Ft. Lauderdale, where he lived for the remainder of his life.
In 1954, Mary Lou began teaching Home Economics at Delhaas High School in Bristol, PA. During basketball season, a young math teacher and Korean War vet, Tom Hamill, asked her to a game. Later, after she was injured in a rollover accident on a rainy night, Tom proposed to her, saying, "You need someone to take care of you." Mary Lou and Tom were married on August 5, 1955.
Back then, married teachers were not supposed to teach at the same school; Mary Lou and Tom's secret came out after she, trying to get Tom to give up sugar in his coffee, put salt in the teacher's lounge sugar bowl. Tom put in a heaping spoonful, tasted the coffee, grimaced, and said, "And I married a home economist!" This would be the first of many tricks she played on Tom, and this was his usual retort. Mary Lou taught at Delhaas until 1957.
They bought a house in the new development of Levittown, PA, where they lived until the fall of 1959, planting roses and a weeping willow and putting in a flagstone patio. Mary Lou sewed outfits for herself and Cindy Lou and designed and sewed costumes for ballet recitals.
In February 1958, Mary Lou and Tom's son, Thomas James, was born. At that time, blood typing was not required for a marriage license; the baby's jaundice revealed that they were Rh incompatible. They never had another child.
In 1959, the family moved to Hammonton, NJ, where Tom took a job as Assistant Principal and Mary Lou stayed home with the toddler, Tommy Jim. In 1960, they moved to Long Beach Island, NJ, where Tom became Principal of Southern Regional High School. They lived there through the March '62 storm, which devastated much of the island, before moving to Quarryville, PA, where Tom became Supervising Principal of the Solanco school district. The family lived in a farmhouse outside Quarryville till 1967.
While Tommy Jim was little, Mary Lou stayed home; however, she had too much energy to sit still. Once the family moved to Quarryville, she returned to her farm roots, gardening, canning, and refinishing antiques while filling in at the high school as a substitute teacher. Once Tommy Jim went to elementary school, she began teaching Home Economics at Solanco High School.
During the Quarryville years, the family gave in to a horse-crazy girl and took on first of many horses. Once the children began going to horse shows, Mary Lou put her sewing and fabric design skills to the task of sewing saddle seat riding outfits, horse coolers, saddle covers, and other projects.
In 1967, the family moved to Mount Joy, PA, where Tom began work as an educational consultant and Mary Lou began to teach Home Economics and supervise student teachers at Messiah College. She took her students to the fabric district in Philadelphia where she had friends among the fabric dealers. She took classes in tailoring, sewing her own suits and skirts. In 1971, Tom began working for the State of New Jersey Department of Education, and the family moved to Mendham, NJ, where Tommy Jim went to Mendham High School. Mary Lou taught consumer education for Rutgers and for the New Jersey Department of Education, then began working for New Jersey Network(now NJTV) as their K-12 programs consultant. On weekends, she served as a groom for Tommy Jim at horse shows, picking out a series of horses' manes and tails and polishing a young show rider's boots.
In 1984, Tom took an early retirement and they moved to Stockton, NJ, so that Mary Lou could be closer to her work in Trenton. She had a CB radio in her car and talked to the truckers on the turnpike as "Pony Girl," while they watched out for "Smokeys." Once, after she had cataract surgery and no longer needed glasses, she was stopped by a "Smokey" who told her that if her license said she needed glasses, she needed to be wearing glasses. After that, she carried a pair of fake glasses, which she put on when she saw flashing lights in her rear-view mirror. She continued to work for NJ Network until 1997, traveling to conferences all across the country and making friends everywhere. Her family still has the swag from those conferences—she gave them as Christmas and birthday gifts for years.
When the family moved to Stockton, Mary Lou's mother, Louise, came to live with them and lived there until 1987 when Louise moved to Chandler Hall, a Quaker-run assisted living facility across the river in Newton, PA. In 1986, Tommy Jim—now TJ—suffered a spinal cord injury. Mary Lou and Tom converted the garage of their house into an accessible apartment and constructed a four-car garage attached to an indoor swimming pool. They swam and bicycled every day. TJ remained living with them while he went back to school, getting his law degree from Widener University Law School in 1989. In 1995, Mary Lou's grandson, Ira, began attending George School, a Quaker school near Chandler Hall. Mary Lou picked him up on weekends, so he could spend time with her and Tom, and he experienced her speedy driving, love of shopping, love of conversation, and love of sweets. She finally retired in 1997, the year Ira graduated from George school.
After retirement (Tom asked, "What have you been waiting for?"), Mary Lou and Tom began to travel, taking road trips around the country, bicycle trips across Europe and cruises around the world. In 2001, they sold the house in Stockton and moved to Solivita, near Kissimmee, FL.
In Solivita, Mary Lou took up golf with a group called the Foxy Niners and became a member of the Red Hat Ladies—even though she thought that red and purple clashed. She and Tom continued traveling, visiting China, Japan, Korea, India, Africa, Italy, Spain, Ireland, and Alaska—anywhere that they had not yet been.
In 2010, they bought a house in Belvedere, New Jersey, planning to share it with TJ in the summer months, returning to Solivita in the winter. They remodeled it and lived there briefly before returning to Solivita, where Mary Lou, after a walk, slipped on a bathroom rug and broke her arm. After two surgeries, she ended up without the use of her right hand—her sewing and drawing hand.
Now in their late 80s, Mary Lou and Tom decided to leave Solivita and move closer to Tom's sister, Sally, and their nieces, Kelly and Jackie, and bought a house in Moss Park, Florida. They lived there with the help of private caregivers until summer 2019, when they moved to Somerby Lake Nona, an assisted living facility, where Mary Lou took part in painting classes, bingo, song fests, and made friends with all the residents and caregivers. She and Cindy Lou had phone or zoom calls every week, sometimes joined by Ira and TJ.
Mary Lou loved life, people, nice fabric, chocolate, Jersey cows, and Tom. We miss her.
Mary Lou was preceded in death by her parents, James and Louise (Brooks) Stewart of Salisbury, MD, her sister Cindy (Stewart) Doerzbach, of Ocean City, MD and her first husband John H. Dulany II, of Ft. Lauderdale, FL. She is survived by her husband, Thomas S. Hamill, Jr. of Lake Nona, FL; her daughter Cynthia Hardy and partner Michael Welsh of Fairbanks, AK; son Thomas J. Hamill and partner Kristina Kruchko of West Deptford, NJ; sister-in-law Cecilia (Sally) (Hamill) Yerkes of Orlando, FL; nieces and nephews Kelly Yerkes and Jackie Henry of St. Cloud, FL, Elizabeth (Yerkes) Scazlo of Michigan, Kathleen (Yerkes) Daugherty of Georgia, Jay Yerkes of New Jersey, James and Eric Doerzbach of Ocean City, MD; and grandson Ira Hardy of Fairbanks, AK. She is missed by her former caregivers Heliana Brito, Alessandra DeLuca, and Tana Ferreira as well as by everyone at Somerby Lake Nona.