Joseph C. Taylor ’70

Joseph died Sept. 5, 2016, of leukemia. Friends and family celebrated his life at his home in Cambridge, Mass.

A child of the South, he originally came to us from Metairie, La. At Princeton, he worked with Theatre Intime and wrote his English thesis on Yeats for the great professor Carlos Baker *40.

Always a man of strong creative sense, he started out as a not-for-profit legal assistant in Washington, preparing data for election lawsuits under the Civil Rights Act. He then went to Cambridge to study at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, earning a master’s degree in public policy. Joseph transitioned into research for the financial industry, where his adventures ranged from Washington to Helsinki, and back to Boston in the service of government funding.

His continuing irrepressible aesthetic bent led him from watercolors to woodblock printing to origami. In addition, he wrote poems and short stories, and served on the board of Boston’s Cantata Singers.

Joseph is survived by his mother, Alice Keitz Taylor; sister D. Alice Taylor; sons Alejandro and Adriano; and three grandchildren. We extend our condolences to them as they deal with missing the vibrancy of his personality. For someone whose life ambition, as stated in our Nassau Herald, was to purchase the Blarney Stone, he certainly made a valiant and joyful attempt.