WEST CORNWALL — Isabelle Crocker Osborne died peacefully Jan. 3, 2023, at her home in West Cornwall, among family and friends and her devoted caregivers. Ms. Osborne inspired those close to her with her perseverance against illness and family tragedy. She was predeceased by both her children and her husband, Charlie. She also coped for many years with emphysema, although she quit smoking in the 1960s. Despite such personal burdens, she took great joy in her horses and equestrian pursuits, and set an example for inner strength and a zest for living.
Known to family and friends as Philla, Ms. Osborne was born Feb. 28, 1929, in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, the daughter of the late Douglas and Isabelle Crocker.
She graduated from Smith College magna cum laude in 1951 where she was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in 1956.
In her youth she was a hiker and mountaineer, making trips to Geneva, Switzerland, where she had studied during her junior year abroad. She was friends with noted Swiss climber, Raymond Lambert, who in 1952 narrowly missed being the first to summit Mount Everest with famed sherpa Tenzing Norgay. Weather stopped them a few hundred meters short. Norgay successfully summited with Sir Edmund Hillary in 1953. Ms. Osborne reminisced recently with family that she helped Lambert provision other Himalayan expeditions, and was a secretary to Norgay when he was hiding from the paparazzi at his friend Lambert’s home in Switzerland.
Her first job out of college was working for the Central Intelligence Agency in Washington. Of the CIA, all she would say was that “my bosses were only interested in me spying on my colleagues down the hall.” She married Charles Cabot Osborne in 1959, a reporter for Life magazine, whose assignments moved them from New York City to Atlanta and Chicago. They returned to New York City in 1961 for good, where Ms. Osborne raised their two children, Caroline and Tom, and worked as a freelance researcher.
At least two of her research employers were prominent critics of the military industrial complex. In the early 1980s, Ms. Osborne was secretary and researcher for Seymour Melman, a Columbia University economist known for his work on measuring negative impacts of the military economy and advocating for conversion of military spending to civilian purposes. Ms. Osborne also conducted research for Ruth Leger Sivard, an economist known for her annual publication of “World Military and Social Expenditures,” chronicling and analyzing military spending versus social spending in countries around the world. Sivard’s statistics illuminated “what she regarded as ‘grotesque’ excesses in defense spending,” according to a Washington Post remembrance. Ms. Osborne worked on and off for Sivard from the mid 1970s until the early 1990s.
In her later years, she and Charlie moved to their long-time country home in West Cornwall.
They both became avid horse enthusiasts, keeping horses at Once Again Farm, in Meriden, and participating in dressage and jumping. In one reunion report for Smith College, Ms. Osborne wrote that she had made “a full time occupation of horseback riding, which is extremely time consuming and mentally and physically humbling.” Friend and dressage coach, Vicki Hammers-O’Neil, said “Philla and Charlie were generous volunteers at all Connecticut Dressage Association activities and horse shows, and eventually an annual volunteer award was named in their honor: ‘The Philla and Charlie Osborne Volunteer Award.’ Their generosity with their horses allowed me to show both Theo and Blackjack successfully, winning many awards.”
Aside from riding, Ms. Osborne and her husband contributed to the Cornwall Chronicle, a monthly newspaper produced by local citizens. She and Charlie were writers and editors for the Chronicle throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s.
She was predeceased by her husband, Charles Osborne in 2005, a daughter, Caroline Osborne in 1979, and a son, Dr. Thomas Osborne in 2019.
She is survived by two nieces, Katharine C. Brengle of New York, New York, and Nancy O. Almquist of Belmont, Massachusetts; and five nephews, Dr. Douglas C. Brengle of Cincinnati, Ohio; William C. Brengle, Jr. of Camden, Maine; Andrew C. Brengle of Ipswich, Massachusetts; Dr. Richard Osborne of Saratoga Springs, NY; and Theodore Osborne of Washington, D.C.
A memorial service for Philla and Tom will be held this spring in West Cornwall at a date to be determined.
