Sharon Lindsay, Fordham University Trustee from 1994 to 2000, died on May 21 in Westchester County where she served as trustee and deputy mayor for the Village of Scarsdale. She was 65 years old.
Lindsay graduated from Fordham’s Thomas More College in 1970 with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science. She went on to study law at Harvard University.
“We have lost one of Fordham’s bright lights,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of the University. “Sharon Lindsay brought many gifts to Fordham, including a lively intelligence, an astonishing capacity for hard work, and a fundamental decency. I know the Fordham family joins me in mourning her loss, and in prayer for her family and loved ones.”
Lindsay worked as a litigation attorney for the firm of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy. From there she became a vice president and assistant general counsel at J.P. Morgan & Co.
“She never talked about her own accomplishments, she talked about the accomplishments of her children,” said her husband of more than 40 years, George Lindsay.
Remembered on a Scarsdale website as someone who was “bright, classy, smart and eloquent,” Scarsdale Mayor Robert Steves said that Lindsay was also “always down to earth … a very warm, friendly person.”
George Lindsay recalled she grew up in a relatively poor family in Sunnyside, Queens, where the kitchen doubled as her bedroom and where she helped with the everyday chore of cooking meals.
“She worked every day of her life,” he said.
Her studies at Fordham, he said, provided Lindsay with “very broad” interests that included urban planning and public education. Those interests drew her toward law, he said, not the other way around.
Her husband said that she was very grateful to the University for the scholarships she had received and believed throughout her life in “paying it back.” Besides serving as a university trustee, Lindsay was on the board of the Friends of the Scarsdale Library. She was president of the Westchester Symphony Orchestra. She chaired Carnegie Hall’s Link Up committee, which funds music instruction for New York City public school students. At the time of her death she was the president of the League of Women Voters of Westchester. She even ran for mayor in 2011.
“She was exemplary community contributor,” said Steves, who is also the assistant treasurer of the University. “She made herself available in a way that was sometimes pushing upstream against a traditional process. She did because she felt it was in the best interest of the village—it wasn’t about her.”
Lindsay was also an accomplished pianist, who often played Chopin for her own amusement and that of her husband who “enjoyed listening to her play.”
Lindsay is also survived by two children, William Lindsay and Kim Friedman, and a granddaughter, Cora Winnett Friedman.
