Former Friendly Crossways owner, community activist, actress
Anne Vesenka. (Courtesy photo)
E. Anne Vesenka, 87, passed on April 21, 2016, at Life Care Center of Nashoba Valley in Littleton with family members at her side. She died in the manner that she had lived since moving there in 2010: peacefully and quietly. Peaceful and quiet, however, are not words that usually described Anne. She was a larger-than-life redhead whose generosity, spirituality, and zest for life touched thousands.
Elizabeth Anne Alcock was born on August 26, 1928, on Cape Cod. Anne graduated from Boston Children’s Hospital with a nursing degree in 1949 and volunteered to be the camp nurse for a group of Quakers building a school in Mexico. There she met Martin Vesenka and married him at the Smith Neck Friends Meeting in 1952. Their partnership lasted 47 productive and happy years.
After they married, they spent summers at the Friendly Crossways Retreat Center in Harvard, assisting the Quaker minister and his wife who had turned a farm into an American Youth Hostel and rustic retreat for nonprofit groups in 1947. Martin and Anne purchased Friendly Crossways in 1963 after two years with the U.S. Agency for International Development in Indonesia.
This move provided the perfect outlet for Anne and Martin’s social activism. They organized peace rallies and family festivals, held camps for Roxbury children during the early years of the Boston busing desegregation, and hosted civil rights workshops. Anne and Martin involved their four children in farm life, raising chickens, sheep, and a large garden, which were used to feed family, friends, and Crossways visitors. The first Ethiopia-bound Peace Corps volunteers were trained at Friendly Crossways; Nova Scotian fishermen came to pick apples and stay in the 25-bed dorm; and the Harvard Lions Club met regularly in the center’s dining hall.
In Harvard, Anne co-organized the original Ugly Apple [Cheese] Co-op and the Harvard Organization of Parents, Educators, and Students (HOPES), an early PTA. She was president of the League of Women Voters of Harvard, an active member of the Garden Club of Harvard, and an early supporter of the Three Apples Storytelling Festival. She sang and acted on stage for more than 40 years, instilling a passion for performance in her children and grandchildren. She defined the Gilbert and Sullivan comic alto roles, such as Buttercup in “H.M.S. Pinafore,” performing on the Harvard Town Hall stage in 1969 with her eldest daughter.
Later Anne wrote for The Harvard Post (the precursor to The Harvard Press), sold real estate for Pieters & Hazel Realtors, and was a docent at both Fruitlands Museum and The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston. She and Martin also traveled widely. In 1996 they retired from Friendly Crossways and moved to Plymouth, where Anne cared for Martin until his passing in 1999.
Anne is survived by her children, nine grandchildren, and great-grandson: Mary Helan Vesenka Turner and her husband, Keith, of Friendly Crossways, and their children, James McCord (and his wife, Sarah, and son, Barry Martin), Daniel Martin, and Rebecca Anne; James Philip Vesenka and his wife, Gwen, of Kennebunkport, Maine, and their boys, Christopher James Davis, Alexander Martin, and Gabriel Schuler; Ruth Ann Lewis and her husband, Scott, of Avon, Connecticut, and their children, Jeffrey Martin and Risa Anne; and Hannah Rebecca Roeder and her husband, Karl, of Pompano Beach, Florida, and their daughter, Rachel Anne. Anne also lives on in memories of the many people whom she inspired. As one wrote, “She was so full of love and life, spreading a joy of the glory of living.”
Anne was a practicing Christian Scientist and a member and First Reader or soloist of the Djakarta, Ayer, and Plymouth First Churches of Christ Scientist. A celebration of Anne’s life will be held at Friendly Crossways on Tuesday, Nov. 22.
