George William Luhrmann

George William Luhrmann Jr., 90, died peacefully at home in Westminster, Vermont on March 15, 2025, with his two living daughters at his bedside.

Those who knew him well called him “Skip” as his parents nicknamed him Skipper when a young child. Born May 20, 1934 he was the only child of an engineer and inventor, George William Sr, and his wife Elsa née Schusler, in a house that had once been his maternal family’s tavern and small farm in Cedar Brook, New Jersey. There was a large garden and he and his father built a pit where he kept numerous snakes he’d order through the mail; he and his mother remembered when a (non-poisonous) black snake disappeared into the house to show up unexpectedly in her bathroom in the middle of the night. His mother spotted a newspaper ad for a Massachusetts boarding school and knowing he was unhappy, successfully applied for financial assistance. Traveling back and forth on the train between Philadelphia and Phillips Andover Academy he’d bring his boa constrictor along in a pillowcase. On occasion the snake slept on the piano as George, a talented musician, practiced for one of his scholarship jobs, playing weekly hymns on the school organ.

He attended MIT, where he met Winifred Bruce, a pastor’s daughter at Boston University, whom he married upon graduation. After college, the two moved to Xenia, Ohio, where George was in the Air Force, and then Dayton, where their first daughter was born. They moved to New York City when George entered Columbia Presbyterian College of Physicians and Surgeons. Winifred worked for a publishing house, and George would walk his first daughter Tanya to preschool and take her to see the dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History. In 1966 the young family, now with two daughters, moved to Englewood, New Jersey, where a third daughter was born two years later. George worked hard to establish himself and when time allowed read Winnie the Pooh stories to his daughters at bedtime.

George finished his residency in psychiatry and graduated into private practice, continuing some work at the hospital. He was fascinated by Freud, always interested in people who struggled and dedicated time working with people who were very ill. In 1987 the family moved to Vermont to escape the New York City suburbs. He worked first at the Brattleboro Retreat, and then at HCRS in Bellows Falls, and finally at New Hampshire Hospital, from which he retired. He loved the Maine coast and Vermont and its seasons. Before he moved, the family would take annual trips to see the leaves, driving north while the daughters did homework and drank fresh cider in the back seat of the station wagon. 

When the family moved to their long-term home in Vermont, he became an ardent gardener building a waterfall and pond in the field behind the house which remains to this day. But his deep love was in reading, and in documenting the passage of individual lives. He had an acute mind and read voraciously. He built a library of thousands of books, many about psychiatry. He was fascinated by dissociation, the human capacity to in effect split off dimensions of human experience so that they are not accessible to everyday awareness. He treated many people with addictions.

He was an inveterate photographer and documenter of the world around him and his family. He took thousands of photographs, trying to capture moods and feelings as they flitted across people’s faces. He also loved capturing landscapes. He was fascinated by rocks, and where they came from in our planet’s history. To the very end of his life, he listened to lectures on geology and physics, and he tried to figure out how the stuff of the everyday world was made. He cared intensely about science.

George was predeceased by nine years by his daughter, Anna Dewdney, the well-known author and illustrator, and seven years by his wife. Wini’s death was a loss from which he never recovered. He is survived by his eldest daughter, Tanya Luhrmann, married to Richard Saller of Stanford, California, and his youngest daughter, Alice Laughlin, married to Josh Laughlin of Putney, and their sons, Leighton and Ledlie; and daughter Anna’s children, Cordelia and Berol Dewdney.

Contributions in his memory may be made to Westminster Cares.

He was a remarkable person.