Longtime Orange County Legislator Spencer McLaughlin loses battle with cancer
By Oliver Mackson
January 25, 2007
Goshen - Spencer McLaughlin, the eloquent, droll veteran of the Orange County Legislature who wore many hats during a lifetime of public service, died late last night at the Arden Hill campus of Orange Regional Medical Center.
He was 62.
His close friend, Legislator A. Alan Seidman, R-Salisbury Mills, said he was notified of McLaughlin’s death at about 9:30 p.m. yesterday. A few hours earlier, Seidman had visited McLaughlin at the hospital, where McLaughlin had been battling incurable pancreatic cancer.
“He was the conscience of the county,” Seidman said this morning, “always doing right for everyone – those who had a voice, and those who needed a voice.”
Seidman and McLaughlin were both elected as county lawmakers in 1989, Seidman representing the Cornwall-Salisbury Mills area, and McLaughlin, a Republican, representing the Monroe-Highland Mills region. “If memory serves, I think we were standing together at the Board of Elections the very next morning,” Seidman recalled this morning, chuckling softly.
During his career in the public sector, McLaughlin served as a deputy executive director of the New York City Commission on Human Rights. He was also the executive director of downtown business improvement districts in Peekskill and Middletown, and had a regular slot as an acerbic, savvy political commentator on the old WALL-AM radio station in Middletown, which went off the air several years ago.
And although he dropped out of law school in his 20s, he returned and graduated in 2000, and went to work for the Greenwald Law Office. He represented both the Village of New Paltz and the Village of Unionville.
He took so many quixotic stances in the Legislature that one of his colleagues dubbed him “a caucus of one.”
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4 comments:
I had the privilege to know Spencer McLaughlin. He was a good man who put the interests of his constituents and the county he loved above and beyond all else. I may not always have agreed with every stance...but you knew with Spencer that whatever his stance was, it was the one he felt in his heart was best. My condolences to his family and the residents of his district on their loss.
Jim Booth
In just two weeks we have lost two men who put everything that they had into creating a better place for all of us.
If we could all strive to be even half the human beings that Mike Levine and Spencer McLaughlin were, this world would be a much better place.
Friends may visit Sunday, January 28, 2007 from 2-4 and 7-9 p.m. at Smith, Seaman and Quackenbush, Inc. Funeral Home, 117 Maple Avenue, Monroe.
Funeral Mass will be 10 a.m. on Monday, January 29, at Sacred Heart Church, 26 Still Road, Monroe. The Rev. Jeffrey Maurer will officiate. Interment will follow at St. Columba Cemetery, Chester.
Memorial donations on Spencer's behalf may be made to "The Spencer McLaughlin Fund"/Community Foundation of Orange County; c/o Alan Seidman, P.O. Box 371, Salisbury Mills, NY 12577.
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