John Merrill Norton

John Merrill Norton arrived in Cambridge from a small town in Illinois as a full-tuition scholarship student at Harvard, where he majored in Government. After a stint on regular duty as an officer in the US Marine Corps and four years in Marblehead, he became a committed Bostonian. A vice-president of Boston Safe Deposit & Trust Company (now merged into Mellon Bank), he also was a long-time treasurer of Trinity Church in the City of Boston, the Boston Preservation Alliance, and the Lili Boulanger Memorial Foundation, as well as the Massachusetts Association for Mental Health in the 1960s. He took particular pleasure in the development of Tent City in the South End, which he joined as a representative of Trinity Church. He also served for a number of years on the Ward 5 Democratic Committee (Beacon Hill and Back Bay), including as Chairman.

He was born on Nov. 14, 1934, in Normal, Illinois (a laugh line with friends and family for years), to Katharine Rhyne Norton and Dee Norton, the first of three children. His father, a widower, had six other children. After his father’s death in 1945, John’s mother decided to get a bachelor’s degree in education, so the children were sent to three different family members: John to his older brother Ralph and family in Urbana, Illinois. The family was reunited in Rock Falls, IL. John was elected president of his senior class and would have been valedictorian, but he refused to turn in a paper one of his teachers was demanding but which he thought was redundant to an earlier one.

His English teacher, James Andrews, asked John to join the summer stock theater in Quincy, Illinois, then John returned to his summer job at the Northwestern Steel and Wire mill in Sterling, Illinois, where he worked for four summers. Encouraged by Andrews to apply to Harvard, John was awarded a full-tuition scholarship from The Harvard Club of Chicago. At that time, scholarship students were given the top floor of each house.

John and his roommates moved to Lowell House. Again, they were given the top floor, K-52. His favorite courses were in American history, and one in Natural Sciences, in which he got an A+. He joined the Harvard Radio Station, WHRB, and became Business Manager.

After Commencement, he married Bettina A. (“Toni”) di Stefano on Boston, on June 16, 1956. In the fall, he joined the US Marine Corps, becoming a 2nd Lt., and when assigned to Camp Lejeune, NC, he was invited to join the elite Recon Co., directly under the commanding general. “Recon” then became a full battalion under the command of Col. Ephraim Kirby-Smith. At the welcoming reception cocktail party in a base outbuilding, the Colonel was wearing a jacket with a patch for University of the South (which, it turned out, his ancestor founded). John asked him, in the way of making conversation, “Sir, where is University of the South?” Col. Kirby-Smith bellowed out, “Well, lieutenant, where the HELL is HAH-VAHD????” That became somewhat of a unit rallying cry for the rest of John’s active service.

John’s tour of active duty was over in early December, 1959, and they moved to Marblehead. John had joined the US Marines Corps Active Reserves. He also joined the Marblehead Little Theater, where he appeared as Jerry in The Zoo Story—with his long monologue on the landlady’s dog, Frank Huster in The Browning Version, The Night of Jan. 16th. Earlier roles for other groups were in Mr. Angel and George Washington Slept Here. He then was appointed to his first treasurer’s job, for the Massachusetts Association for Mental Health.

In 1964, John, who had been a securities salesman for Blair & Co., joined The Boston Safe Deposit & Trust Company as an Investment Officer.

In August 1964 the family moved back into his wife’s family home on Beacon Hill. In those days, one had to live in an area for six months to qualify to vote, so both he and Toni returned separately to Marblehead to cast their vote in the 1964 presidential election. They lived in Precinct One, “The Old Town.” They were later told that it went Democratic for the first time in modern history, by one vote…

He was confirmed into the Episcopal Church (deserting his Methodist upbringing and having long since abandoned his temperance pledge) at Trinity Church and soon was made assistant Treasurer, in 1969. He served as Treasurer, until he resigned in 1988, as a result of his position as long-time treasurer of the Boston Preservation Alliance. He remained treasurer of both the Lili Boulanger Memorial Foundation and the Boston Preservation Alliance until 2018.

John was a member of the Union Boat Club. He and his wife attended Boston’s Waltz Evenings at the Old Copley Plaza Hotel for forty years. He had joined the Harvard Musical Association in 1980 and served for many years on its Annual Dinner Committee (the primary enjoyment being choosing wines for each course).

His final job in the USMCR was head of call-up for “ready reservists” in the Northeast: New England, New York, and New Jersey. He was an honored guest at a USMCR dinner in Portland, Maine, and retired in 1997 as a full “bird” Colonel. To his amazement, he and his compatriots were never called up for active duty, despite four US engagements or wars.

Every summer, the family moved to their summer house, a wooded retreat in Acton, MA, where a generator is still used for water pressure and lights. John spent summers gardening, another of his favorite activities. And he watched birds, a major pastime of most members of several generations of the Norton family.

He and Toni retired in 2001 and spent the next fifteen years traveling often to most countries in Europe, Japan, and Peru, enjoying architecture, music, and paintings. John is widely known for the breadth of his knowledge, his wit, and his cheerful demeanor. He has spent a lifetime reading, his constant preoccupation. One Christmas, Toni gave him a magnet to attach to the fireplace fire-screen, beside his favorite chair. The magnet says, “READ MORE.”

In 2015, he began showing signs of dementia. The death of his eldest son, James, who died in Nov. 2016 from a heart attack while descending from a weekend with Acton Boy Scouts in the White Mountains (Boston Globe, Nov. 14), is believed to have hastened John’s decline. In June 2020, he became a resident of Rogerson House in Jamaica Plain.

In addition to his wife and his late son James, his other close family members are Benjamin and wife Naoko (Murakami) and children Masaki Carmen and Hanako Giulia; Giulia di Stefano Norton and wife Ellen Donaghey; Laura Emily Agarwal and children Sonia Tirabassi and Nikhil Colton; his daughter-in-law Jamie (Miller) and grandsons Christopher Daniel and David Benjamin Norton; and his brother James Austin Norton and wife Marge. John was predeceased by his sister, Nancy Salas, as well as all six half-brothers and sisters from his father’s first marriage. John, in the last ten years, was also the patriarch of the large Norton clan, most of whom are educators and still live in the Midwest.

Contributions in his name are welcome to The Boston Preservation Alliance, 87 Mount Vernon Street, Boston, MA 02108.