Fredric Spar

PRINCETON… Fredric J. Spar, 70, died at home in Princeton, NJ on December 22, 2018.

Born in Brooklyn, NY Fred was a student-athlete who ran track at Midwood High School and Cornell University. His career had many chapters: He worked as an elementary-school science teacher before completing a Ph.D. (1980) at Brown University, where he studied Chinese history and spent a year in Taipei, Taiwan at the Stanford Center. He lectured at Keene State College before working thirty-six years as a communications consultant at Kekst & Company in Manhattan. He was a member of the 2010 class at Harvard University’s Advanced Leadership Initiative and applied his experience thereafter advising or serving on the boards of environmental and education organizations: the Watershed Institute, Friends of Princeton Open Space, New York City Audubon Society, Generation Schools, and City Year New York. He was also chair of Friends of the Rogers Refuge, for which he worked tirelessly on improvements to wildlife habitat and accessibility for human visitors.

Fred moved to Princeton when he married Winifred Hughes, a fellow graduate student at Brown University. Together they spent many hours birding and hiking, rooting for the Boston Red Sox, and engaged in a life-long intellectual discussion. Fred was dedicated to his garden and continued to read and speak Mandarin throughout his life. He shared his passion for sports and the outdoors with his children through skiing, fishing, tennis, and coaching soccer and Little League baseball. Fred will be remembered as a loving husband and father, a great intellect in both scholarship and business, an environmentalist, a man of understated wit, and a soul of exceptional kindness and generosity of spirit.

He is survived by his wife of thirty-eight years, Winifred Hughes Spar, his sons Adam and Alex, his sister Laurie, and her husband John Pierce. He also leaves his aunt, Edith Gilitos, cousins, sisters-and-brothers-in-law, and nieces and nephews.

Burial was in Princeton Cemetery on December 24, 2018. A memorial service will be Sunday, January 27 at 1pm at The Jewish Center, 435 Nassau Street, Princeton, NJ . Donations in his memory would be welcomed at the organizations he served.