Edward Alexander Fox

Stephentown – Edward Alexander Fox, beloved husband, father and grandfather, died Thursday, September 26, 2013, after a short illness. Ed Fox was born in 1920 and raised in Manhattan. He graduated from the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in 1937 and from Harvard University with a degree in physics in 1941. He was studying for a civil engineering degree at Columbia University when Pearl Harbor was attacked. He enlisted in the Navy and trained at the Naval Academy, where he earned his officer’s commission. He served three years in the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign and one year in the Asiatic Pacific Campaign as Engineering Officer and then as Executive Officer on the U.S.S. Rhind, a Benham class destroyer.  He received a Bronze Star after the Allied invasion of Sicily.
Following the war, Ed Fox obtained his civil engineering degree and worked for the Stock Construction Company in Manhattan as a construction engineer on several projects, including Idlewild Airport, now known as the John F. Kennedy International Airport, and the famous parabolic arch Municipal Asphalt Plant on East River Drive, now known as FDR Drive, in Manhattan. He then returned to Columbia University where he earned his doctorate in mechanics.  He joined the Faculty of Mechanics (later Mechanical Engineering) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, in 1954, where he taught until his retirement in 1984.
He found his greatest joy in his love for the woman with whom he shared his life for 60 years. Ed and Sally Wister Ingersoll met in New York City and were married in 1949. Ed had been deeply influenced by the many remarkable women in his family, including his mother, Rebecca, who had immigrated as a child from Bar, Russia, along with her sister Theresa (Serber) Malkiel, an irrepressible union organizer and advocate for women’s suffrage. In Sally Ingersoll, Ed recognized a similarly wonderful and formidable woman.
Ed and Sally were active in social justice advocacy and in opposing the war in Vietnam. In 1957, they bought an old farm on a quiet country road in Stephentown, NY. Initially a summer home it became their full time residence for thirty years. Ed ran for Congress in 1970 on the New Democratic Coalition ticket against Congressman Samuel Stratton, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.  Although Ed lost, the race was important in demonstrating that opposition to the war in Southeast Asia extended throughout the Capital District.  Ed supported Sally as she earned her doctorate in microbiology, the first person to do so at RPI, and then joined the faculty of the College of Saint Rose. In later years, they lived in Cambridge, MA, and then, after Sally’s death, Ed moved to Wayland, MA.
Ed Fox is pre-deceased by his daughters Deborah Marian Fox and Patricia Anne Fox and by his wife, Sally.  He is survived by his daughters Barbara S. Fox of Wayland and Susan R. Fox-Erlich of Cambridge, MA, and by four granddaughters, Rebecca Saxton-Fox of Amman, Jordan, Theresa Saxton-Fox of Pasadena, CA, Emma Erlich of Cambridge, MA, and Helen Erlich of Coral Gables, FL. Services will be held privately.  In lieu of flowers, donations in Ed Fox’s memory may be made to support comfort homes for Fisher House Foundation, Inc., 111 Rockville Pike, Suite 420, Rockville, MD, 20850.