Jan Griswold Edick

Jan Edick was born in Saginaw, Michigan, on December 24, 1936 and raised with Midwestern rural values of honesty, decency and fairness, which he took seriously for the “four score and change” years he wandered the planet. Jan died in Concord, New Hampshire, on May 27, 2026.

Jan’s public education began in Midland, Michigan, public schools and was completed in Traverse City schools after his family moved there in 1945. His higher education produced a B.S. in Design from U. of Michigan; Diploma and Graduate Certificate from School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and an Master of Fine Arts from Tufts University. A year’s travel and study in Europe followed, on a traveling scholarship from the School of the MFA. With experience in several community colleges, he is an advocate for their value.

He was married twice, to Leslie Beaudette and to Mary Joyce DeWeerd, with whom he has shared the last 54 years.

He is survived by his wife, Mary, his children by Leslie, Stefan Edick of Gloucester, MA, and Sarah Edick (husband, Alan Holmes) of Traveler’s Rest, SC; a sister, Mary Helen Winfield ( husband, Scott Winfield) of Stuarts’s Draft, VA; and brother Christopher Rex Edick (wife, JoAnne Stienborn), of East Lansing, MI. Jan was predeceased by his parents, Leila Ruth Edick (1971) and E. Rex Edick (1993).

During his college years, it became apparent that Jan had entered the throes of alcoholism, and in 1971 he entered into the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. In 2026 he achieved 55 years of continuous sobriety, without which none of the following would have been possible.

His working life included freelance photography; work in a pewter shop – a mix of factory labor and handcrafting; quasi-engineering in a public works department; and IT programming and analysis for a state agency and a public utility. Utility consolidation and staff reduction set him free, and he ended his working years as a pottery apprentice in his wife Mary’s pottery studio.

Jan was an enthusiastic participant in community theater productions in Midland, MI, and in Marblehead and Newburyport, MA.

He became a daily runner when he took his first desk job in IT, running in numerous 10K races to benefit various causes. After the IT world, he and Mary bought bicycles, regularly riding “their road” in Littleton, NH, and the rail trails of Vermont, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Michigan, for which he became an advocate.

He served on parish committees and finance committees for Unitarian churches in Massachusetts and Vermont, and on the Conservation Commission and Library Board in Littleton, NH, chairing the Conservation Commission his final year on the board.

Singing in the Unitarian choir in Newburyport, MA, led to encouragement to try choral singing. This led to nearly 50 years of singing bass with The Newburyport Choral Society, the North Country Chorus, and the HHH Singers in his retirement community.

Modest success in the craft pottery business allowed Jan and Mary to indulge their love of the outdoors in backpacking, whitewater canoeing, and numerous canoeing trips in the American southwest and Canadian arctic and sub-arctic.

Jan played Geoffrey Chaucer in the North Country Chorus’s Madrigal Dinner for

several years. The following line from the prologue to “The Canterbury Tales”

neatly summarizes Jan’s life: “And gladly would he lerne and gladly teche.”