Obituary: Les Sims
/Les Sims
Former Hull resident Les Sims died March 30, 2024 in his Portland, Oregon home after a battle with lung cancer and kidney disease.
Although he lived in Hull only from 1973 until mid-1978, Mr. Sims always viewed his time here as the seminal phase of his life. Mr. Sims, his late wife, Nancy Jane, and their daughter, Jennifer, frequently visited longtime friends Margie and Gil Peters and their young son, Shawn, who were living in Hull.
When the two families decided to buy a large, single-family home in the Alphabet section, their plans for the joint living arrangement almost were scuttled before they began, when several large banks declined to grant a mortgage to a pair of unrelated families. Thankfully, Mr. Sims’s family had ties to the Brockton Credit Union, which approved the mortgage.
Despite working more than 50 miles away from his home during that span, Mr. Sims said he never minded the sometimes-two-hour commute because “When I finally get to Hull, look where I live!”
He didn’t even complain when his commuting mettle was tested severely on February 6, 1978. That was the evening that the Blizzard of ’78 turned Mr. Sims’s drive home into a five-hour nightmare. When he finally dumped his car into a snow drift in front of his house, he found his loved ones shivering in the cold and dark.
Mr. Sims, a former Marine and outdoorsman, gathered wood and started blazes in the home’s two fireplaces, then contained the heat by hanging blankets from the ceiling to close off the area. Little did the family know that this temporary shelter would be needed to keep them warm for the next 65 hours till the power came back on.
Under Mr. Sims’s guidance, the family weathered that major storm until that summer, when the next fortuitous event in his life occurred. His boss, whose business involved buying and assembling electronic parts from South Korea, needed to move the company to the West Coast to cut down on the brutally long travel time. Mr. Sims, the company’s chief operating officer, suggested they move the firm to Los Angeles where, coincidentally, his housemate, Margie, had been offered a job at the same time. Two months later, they all moved to Santa Monica, CA, while never losing their special love for Hull, and visiting often with their good friends, Marshall and Amy Shapiro and Jim Koplow.
In the 15 years he lived in Southern California, Mr. Sims was a purchasing agent and operations manager for several companies, as well as the facilities manager of Temple Beth Shir Sholom in Santa Monica.
In 1993, the Simses moved to Las Vegas for work and the Peters clan returned to Hull for the next quarter century. Mr. Sims remained close with Margie, Gil, and Shawn, even after Nancy Jane died of cancer at age 51.
In time, Mr. Sims remarried. In their retirement, he and his wife, Nancy Thompson, traveled extensively and shared many adventures, including walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain, and housesitting around the world, before settling in Oregon.
Mr. Sims is survived by his wife, and his daughter, Jennifer Snow Maysles, and her husband, Vince, his sister, Cheryle Rosenberg, of Milford, as well as his much-loved cat, Ricky. While no funeral service is immediately planned, there will be a celebration of life gathering this summer in Hull.
