Richard vanCortlandt Parker
CATONSVILLE - Richard vanCortlandt Parker, or “Dick” to all who knew and loved him, passed away peacefully at home on March 18, 2024 in Catonsville, Maryland.
Dick was born on August 18, 1924 in Morristown, NJ. He graduated from the St. Marks School in Southborough, MA in the class of 1942, where he received the school’s Mathematics award.
Dick enrolled at Princeton University as an engineering student in the fall of 1942, but left college after his freshman year to join the U.S. Army. He was wounded in combat in Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge, for which he was awarded a Purple Heart, spending the rest of the war in various British and American hospitals recovering use of his arm. He received an Honorable Discharge in December, 1945.
In 1947, he married his wartime sweetheart, Betty Louise Barefoot of Oklahoma in Ft. Thomas, Kentucky. They were happily married for 69 years, until her death in 2016.
Returning to Princeton after the war with his bride, Dick graduated with a B.S. degree and High Honors in Engineering. After a stint with the Goodyear Company in Akron, Ohio, and with their three young children in tow, Dick and Betty returned east, settling in Wilmington, Delaware, where Dick became an engineer at All American Engineering (AAE), a small aerospace firm that designed and built aircraft arresting gear and military aerial cargo delivery systems.
In 1964, Dick took a month-long trip around the world in a U.S. Air Force C-130 cargo plane, demonstrating the company’s technology to the armed forces of numerous countries. During the 1970s, he and Betty lived in England and Ireland, where he was managing director for two AAE-owned companies. Upon completion of those assignments, the two of them moved back to Wilmington, where Dick worked briefly for AAE again before retiring.
Dick had a number of keen interests during his life. He particularly loved sailing, which he learned as a boy on summer holidays in Bar Harbor, Maine. As an adult, he crewed on several winning yachts in the Georgetown Racing Fleet (GRF) on the north Chesapeake Bay over more than forty years, served as ship’s navigator on several Annapolis-Bermuda offshore races, and eventually became the racing fleet’s commodore for a term. He became a skilled celestial navigator, who shared his knowledge by teaching navigation courses through the United States Power Squadron.
In 2016, he and Betty moved from their long-time home in Wilmington to the Charlestown Retirement community in Catonsville, Maryland, where he built a new community of friends.
Dick was a devoted Episcopalian, from his teen years at St. Marks, where he learned how to read as a lector, through more than 40 years of ushering at Christ Church Christiana Hundred in Wilmington, to being a lector at his last parish. After moving to Catonsville, Dick joined St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church, where he was pleased and astonished at age 92 to be invited to join the Vestry, serving a full term and using his math and computer skills to particularly focus on the financial reporting system.
Dick’s greatest joy though, which he believed to be the crowning achievement of his life and marriage, was his family. He was loved and admired in turn by all the many family members and friends who knew him.
He is survived by his daughter Charlotte (Parker) Vincent (Frank), his sons Wayne Parker (Helene) and Robert Parker (Linda), his grandchildren Emily Vincent (Eric), Elizabeth (Parker) Eichfeld ( Jahn), Micah Parker (Casey), James Parker (Ginny), Maura Vincent-Seyd, Kara Vincent (Scott) and Eric Vincent (Areti) and his seven great-grandchildren, Eliza and Arthur Eichfeld; Noa Parker; Macy, Anna and Samantha Tignor; and Evangelia Vincent. He is pre-deceased by his wife Betty, his parents Dudley and Sarah, his sister Sally, his brother John, and his grandchildren Diana and Daniel.