Belmont, ma

After she had a stroke in her late 60s, Catherine Lugar amazed her close friends by carrying on her regular activities. She remained an avid rower, even with drastically reduced mobility. Without asking for help, she’d make her way down the long path to the scull, dragging one leg behind her.

“She was determined, at the beginning, that she was going to get it all back,” said Gretchen Sterling, one of Catherine’s close friends from her days at the Newton College of the Sacred Heart. “It was an effort to get out of her chair, walk to the front porch, walk down the stairs, get in the car. But she was determined.”

Known as Cathy to her many friends, she was known for her resilience. Lacking a strong connection to her relatives, Cathy built a close-knit network of friends: work colleagues, college classmates, and friends from her high school days in St. Louis and Miami.

Joel and Naomi Rosenthal were working in Stony Brook University’s history department 55 years ago when they met Cathy, then a resident assistant in a dorm. Her brilliance instantly dazzled the couple.

The following year, Cathy became an administrator for the department’s new graduate program. She ended up a student in that same program.

Cathy earned her doctorate 10 years later, writing a dissertation on trade between Europe and Bahia, a merchant colony in Brazil. She spent almost two years in the country, learning Portuguese and tapping local sources. According to Naomi Rosenthal, many scholars still cite Cathy’s “The Merchant Community of Salvador, Bahia: 1780-1830,” in their research.

Cathy spent the late 1970s picking up jobs as an adjunct professor of Brazilian history whenever she could. Classes with Cathy were always lively, and she encouraged her students to engage with each other and the course material, rather than simply listening to her lectures.

“She stayed curious about the world and politics and kept up with Brazilian studies, even when she was no longer teaching,” Joel Rosenthal said.

Cathy’s interest in the world went beyond her studies; she loved a good adventure. She visited the Canadian Maritimes, Portugal, and the Panama Canal. Cathy even spent a year tracking distant relatives to various Midwest cities, traveling by train.

“She got a yen, she picked up and did something,” Joel Rosenthal said. “She never had a lot of money, but she was careful enough with it to subsidize that sort of thing.”

Cathy’s stroke ended her days of traveling. She eventually lost mobility, despite her efforts to regain physical strength. After living on her own for years, she moved to the Youville House Assisted Living facility in Cambridge, and then to the Belmont Manor Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Belmont.

Friends and colleagues visited as often as they could. Sterling showed up weekly with seven or eight books. A week later, Cathy would have read them all. Mysteries, biographies, and historical fiction were her favorites.

Sometimes, Sterling would bring another friend who had grown up in St. Louis. Cathy “remembered the names of bakeries that they went to and places that they shopped,” Sterling said. “They’d talk about things like that and laugh. Cathy loved talking about St. Louis!”

Catherine had been living in Belmont Manor for about a year when she contracted the coronavirus. She died on April 21 at age 77.

You can find the full story published in the Boston Globe