Obituary

Eileen was born in New York on July 26, 1944, the eldest child of Albert Coumont and Melba (Campbell) Coumont.  Her father was an electrical engineer then employed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in the outfitting of submarines.  After the War the family moved several times as her father’s work developed; she recalled Falls Church, Virginia, with particular happiness.  Her teenage years were spent, again happily, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, a college town that encouraged her attraction to academe.  She graduated from Wellesley College with a major in Greek, but family difficulties stood in the way of further study.  She worked for a time at MIT, and would say proudly that she had known Noam Chomsky before he became a prominent political figure. A first marriage took her to Texas, but it was not successful, and she returned to the academic life, this time focussing on English literature, first at the University of Houston and then, as a doctoral candidate, at Rice University.  She served as research assistant to the eminent Victorian scholar Robert Patten, contributing particularly to his edition of Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (Penguin Classics, 1974), one of the best popular editions of a classic English novel ever published.  Her doctoral dissertation, on Pope’s translation of Homer’s Iliad, was supervised by Monroe Spears.  To the surprise of some of her fellow-students, who thought a little-read  eighteenth-century translation of an ancient Greek poem hardly worthy of serious consideration, she was appointed an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Princeton University in 1973.  The Department was developing an interest in the classical background of English literature, and for this Eileen was an ideal appointment.
      
Eileen spent four happy and successful years at Princeton.  In addition to teaching her courses in English literature and the classics, she supervised undergraduate fourth-year honors theses, and embarked on graduate teaching.  On the departmental service side, she was assigned the duty of assisting applicants to major scholarship competitions, such as the Rhodes Scholarships. She gave great energy to this task, making sure that the candidates presented themselves truthfully and effectively, sometimes facing resistance on the part of those she was trying to help, but she persisted, and the Department’s record in these competitions improved.
Princeton had only recently become coeducational, and female faculty were still few.  Eileen did not lack admirers, but in her first year she formed a friendship with John Baird, a junior professor at the University of Toronto who was on sabbatical doing research in Firestone Library.  They became engaged, and were married on May 31, 1975, in the Princeton University Chapel by their dear friend, the Dean of the Chapel, the Rev. Ernest Gordon.  
Eileen loved her work and interactions with her colleagues, but her deepest wish was to become a mother and care for her children.  She resigned in 1977, and moved to Toronto.  There she raised her three daughters, Eleanor, Caroline, and Alexandra.  As they grew up, her activities naturally changed, and in the 1990s she became very active in the Parent-Teacher organization at Humberside Collegiate, serving as president for several years.  She engaged in many ways, from  the selection of a Principal to campaigning for music education at all levels, striving always to make the PTA strong in its support of positive developments in the running of the school and the policies of the district and provincial authorities.
Eileen had always been good with her hands and interested in making things.  An early passion for quilt-making broadened into wood-working and carpentry: the fitted desk and shelving that houses the landline phone in the hall is her work; her steps to the front porch, brilliantly executed to look straight although in fact they have to be askew to fit the space, are still good after nearly thirty years.  In the 1990s she became interested in bear-making: constructing teddy-bear-like figures wearing amusing outfits and selling them, using the then new technology of the World Wide Web.  This led her to various other interests, including the campaign to stop the bile-farming of Asian moon bears, to which she donated one of her creations to head a fund-raising drive.  The dot-com crash ruined the bear-making market, and Eileen switched to making and selling smaller objects before sadly concluding that the game wasn’t worth the candle.
Craft sales might have slumped, but teachers are always needed, and Eileen turned to tutoring.  Since most of her clients were upper-level high school students, applications naturally came up, and Eileen’s previous experience with scholarships prepared her to bring out the qualities of her young people.  Several of them were successful in being admitted to leading universities like Cornell and Harvard, and, best of all, some kept up with her as their careers developed.
Her last two years were dominated by illness and its treatment, but she was determined to stay at home and remain an out-patient.  Her devotion to movies never faltered, especially her Hitchcock favourites, Shadow of a Doubt and Strangers on a Train.  The nightly movie showing continued through her last night at home before the collapse that took her to a hospital bed at last, felled not by cancer but by an unexpected and medically surprising viral infection.  She died in her sleep in the early hours of September 18, 2024, eight months shy of the golden wedding anniversary to which she was looking forward. She leaves her husband, her sisters Carolyn and Barbara, her three wonderful daughters and their husbands, and five adored grandchildren.

Visitation

Service

Date
September 25, 2024
Location
Cardinal Funeral Home Annette Chapel
Time
11:00 AM

Burial / Entombment / Cremation

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