Barbara L. Dolgin

Barbara L. Dolgin, 98, of Bridgton and New York City, wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and lawyer, died peacefully in her New York City home on Sunday, Feb. 11, 2018, surrounded by people and things she loved.

Barbara summered in Bridgton for nearly 90 years starting in 1928.

In the early years of her Bridgton summers, she and her brother and their parents, both New York City school teachers, took the boat to Portland and the narrow-gauge railroad from Portland to Bridgton, staying at Abbott’s on Highland Lake, now known as Tarry-A-While.

In the mid-1960s Barbara and her husband, Joseph Dolgin, bought a cabin on Moose Pond in Denmark, where they spent their summers until Joseph died. Shortly thereafter, Barbara sold that cabin, but continued to spend summers in Bridgton at the Moose Pond home of her son, Dan, and her daughter-in-law, Loraine.

She was one month short of her 99th birthday when she died.

Born in Manhattan, raised in the Bronx, she graduated from Barnard College and Columbia Law School, where she was a Kent Scholar.

After World War II commenced in Europe and Asia, but before the United States entered the war, she worked for the United States Treasury Department in its Office of Foreign Funds Control, tracking conduct by foreign national corporations then believed to be potentially belligerent to the United States. She married Dr. Joseph Dolgin in late 1942, two weeks before he shipped out for three-and-a-half years of service as a captain in the U.S. Army medical corps, largely in North Africa and Italy. They were married for nearly 52 years when Joseph died in 1994.

During the war, Barbara moved back to New York City, where she worked as a trusts and estates attorney at Root, Clark, Buckner & Ballantine, later known as Dewey Ballantine Bushby Palmer & Wood. She was one of the first women lawyers to work at a large Wall Street law firm. After she retired from Dewey Ballantine, she worked in the general counsel’s office of Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York and then, before retiring entirely in 1990, as Of Counsel to Towne Dolgin Sawyier & Horton and its successor firm, McDermott, Will & Emery.

After her husband returned from service in the war, they settled in Staten Island, N.Y., where he was born.

She is survived by three children and their spouses; seven grandchildren and their spouses; and two great-grandchildren.