CORNWALL — Lisa Lansing (Simont), age 81, of Cornwall, passed away on Dec. 24, 2023, after a short illness.
Lisa was born on May 13, 1942, to Tod and Elizabeth Lansing in Providence, Rhode Island. After she graduated from Roger Ludlow High School in Fairfield, she went on to get her undergraduate degree in 1964 at Mount Holyoke College where she was the chief editor of the Mount Holyoke News.
After her college graduation and knowing that she wanted to be a newspaper reporter, Lisa started a three-year stint working for the Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield, Massachusetts
In 1967 Lisa left Pittsfield for Washington, D.C. where she took a position at the Congressional Quarterly.
In early 1968, Lisa left the Congressional Quarterly to join her first husband, Milton Gwirtzman, to work on the campaign of Presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy. Lisa, who worked for Pierre Salinger, the head of the press operation for Kennedy’s campaign, was with the campaign in California when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated and returned to New York on Air Force One with his body on board.
In 1969, Lisa’s journalistic work in politics took a back seat to motherhood after Matthew, the first of her two children, was born. A year later she spent 18 months in Paris to absorb the culture and to pursue her passion for cooking where she took a six-week course at Cordon Bleu.
While pregnant with her second child, Dan, in 1971, Lisa came back to the US to live in Chevy Chase, Maryland where, throughout the 1970s, she often volunteered her talents to causes she embraced.
In 1976 her family moved to Newton, Massachusetts. In 1981, Lisa earned a master’s degree in business administration with a specialty in public management from Boston University. Later in the 1980s she worked in the development office of the Museum of Science in Boston.
Lisa was passionate about art. She worked at the China Trade Museum until its 1984 merger with the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem.
Often the traveler and adventurer, in 1976, she visited China with Milton in one of the first groups to travel there from the west since 1949. In the mid 1980s Lisa went on an Outward-Bound trip in the Everglades in the southwest coast of Florida.
In 1989, Lisa and Milton had an amicable divorce and she soon met Marc Dalton (Doc) Simont who became her close companion and future husband. She bought a house in Cornwall in 1990, where she spent the rest of her life.
Lisa was the Finance Director for the Town of Cornwall for 16 years until she retired in 2007. She volunteered for a number of societies, served on the board of the Cornwall Library, and also was the President of the Cornwall Historical Society until her death.
Her survivors include her husband, Doc Simont; her two sons, Matthew and Daniel Gwirtzman; a sister, Miss Lydia Lansing, and a brother, Robert Lansing. She was predeceased by a sister, Mary Lansing.
There will be a service for Lisa in the spring. In lieu of flowers, gifts to the Cornwall Historical Society and/or the Cornwall Library will be welcome.
