Christopher Paul McCormack of Trumbull, a former Westport resident, died April 30 from complications due to cardiac arrest. He was 63.

Born on Jan. 16, 1957, he was the son of the late Donald P. and Patricia S. McCormack of Westport. She was an award-winning journalist whose career spanned more than 50 years, much of it as a nationally published columnist and senior editor for United Press International (UPI).

He graduated from Yale with a B.A. in musicology in 1974. At Yale he played viola in the Yale Orchestra and conducted the Gilbert & Sullivan Society.

He received a Master of Music degree from Eastman School of Music in 1981. After trying his hand at conducting local theatre groups, he went to law school at Fordham University, graduating in 1987. He married Sarah Doyle McCormack, formerly of New Canaan, the same year.

Lowell Dean McFarland of Westport died May 2 in Norwalk Hospital due to complications from heart failure. He was 82.

Lowell McFarland: fashion photographer. Contributed photo

A resident of Westport since 1989, he was born in Independence, Missouri in 1937, the second of four sons of Francis Gale McFarland and Fay Seidelman.

The family moved to Brooklyn during World War II and Lowell graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School and then from Pratt Institute in Fine Art. He was one of the early students in the newly created NYU Graduate School of Cinematography.

Lowell was an officer in the U.S. Army and commanded a signal unit stationed in France during the Berlin crisis. 

Edith Grimm Miller, a former Westport resident, died April 28 in her retirement community in Decatur, Georgia. She was 100.

Edith was born to Rudolph and Edythe Grimm, Jan. 14, 1920, in New York. She attended the Lincoln School of Columbia’s Teachers College and Middlebury College, graduating with a B.A. in sociology and physical education in 1941.

While teaching in Utica, New York, she married Lt. Thomas Gourlay of the U.S. Army’s Tenth Mountain Division. In 1944, son Michael was born in Austin, Texas. After husband Thomas was lost to World War II, Edith moved to Westport and taught at the Bolton School.

In 1949, she married Dr. Henry Miller of Tarrytown, New York. They had two sons, Dwight and Bruce, and lived in Huntington Station, New York until Prof. Miller’s retirement from Queens College in 1971. He continued to teach as an emeritus professor at Morehouse College and Oglethorpe University in Georgia.

Robin Nada Thew, a former longtime Westport resident, died April 30. She was 94.

She was born on Nov. 30, 1925 in Westport to a creative family.

Her father, Robert Garrett Thew, a sculpture and painter working primarily in the advertising industry and her mother, Elise Green Thew a journalist, welcomed her into a world full of inspiration and ingenuity that would follow her all of her life.

At a young age, Robin showed outstanding artistic abilities and at 12 years old was selected by Good Housekeeping to design several patterns for its issues.

Douglas Stephen Cornwell of Norwalk died April 24 in Norwalk Hospital due to complications from a stroke brought on by COVID-19.  He was 77.

He was born in Riverside, California on Sept. 22, 1942 but spent most of his life on the East Coast.

After initially attending Manhasset High School on Long Island, he graduated from the Kent School in Kent, Connecticut. He earned a B.A. from Vanderbilt University and an MBA from Columbia University.

An Air Force veteran, he served in Sevilla, Spain as an air traffic controller; one of his favorite stories from that time was of being one of the last to communicate with the plane that accidentally dropped a bomb into the Mediterranean, eventually discovered by a toothless Spanish fisherman after professional searchers had failed to locate it.

Dorothy Byrde Smith of Westport died April 26. She was 95.

She was born and raised in the Pittsburgh area on Oct. 2, 1924 and spent her early years being very close to her grandfather, a Methodist minister. He was an enormous influence on her, and she spoke of him often in her aging years.

Dorothy married and had three children Barbara, Warren (Rick) and Gary.

She was always working with many different jobs such as a riveter during World War II, working for Westinghouse and eventually working for an optometrist in Oakland, Pennsylvania, retiring at the age of 65.

H. Haynes Farmer died April 24 of natural causes at his Westport home. He was 93.

A resident of Westport for 65 years, Haynes was born in Springfield, Missouri on March 4, 1927, to parents Homer R. and Ruth Haynes Farmer.

After serving the U.S. Navy in World War II, he received his Bachelor’s degree from Missouri State University. He then went on to receive his Master’s and Ph.D. from the University of Missouri in the field of organic chemistry where he was a member of Sigma Xi, the scientific research honor society.

He worked for Shell Oil Company in Houston, Texas prior to receiving his Ph.D. He then moved to Connecticut and began his career at RT Vanderbilt in Norwalk, where he worked in research and development for 36 years.