A Lifetime, A Legacy: Bill Stump
Bill Stump with Maggie Mae
Stone Harbor’s Bill Stump will be remembered as an enthusiastic sailor who treasured his family and selflessly served his church, yacht club and local community.
Stump was 70 when he died at home – as he wished – on Jan. 23 after a long battle with lung cancer.
The Stump family is deeply rooted in Seven Mile Island history. By the time Bill and his four siblings joined other relatives on 95th Street, they were fourth-generation islanders.
Bill’s brother Gerald, also known as Jay, recalls the annual family trek in station wagons from their home in Indiana, Pa., to their grandmother Wear’s house in Stone Harbor for the summer. Their mother, Dorothy Wear Stump, led that lively caravan. Gerald estimates that his brother was an infant when he first arrived at the place he would come to call home.
After graduating from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Stump started his teaching career in Florida before returning north to teach mathematics at Wildwood High School in 1981.
His relocation proved to be a pivotal move in more ways than one.
The future Mrs. Stump, Patty Brewin, also taught math at Wildwood High, having started there in 1976. As colleagues and friends, Patty and Bill organized and implemented a number of school activities, including trips to Europe. One year they ran against each other in an election to determine who would be the Wildwood Education Association’s treasurer. Patty won the vote, a victory that would become a family inside joke for years to come.
In 1995, Patty, 41, and Bill, 46, married – “each for the first time,” she says.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Our Saviour’s retired pastor, Glenn Schoenberger, remembers their wedding. He also recollects bits of their family’s history and how Stump attended services wearing a woolen cap with a sailboat on it toward his life’s end.
Stump was a parish member since childhood and served as Our Saviour’s treasurer for at least 20 years, Schoenberger says. “He was quite the volunteer!” the pastor adds. It runs in the family. Stump’s mother Dorothy served as president of the church’s women’s group. Patty will now assume his role as the parish’s treasurer.
As for the Stumps’ wedding, “Bill was the first person I knew who had a groom’s cake,” says Schoenberger. “It had a sailboat on it.”
A groom’s cake is a second cake served at some wedding receptions, one that reflects special interests of the groom. The custom originated in England and became popular in the American South in the late
19th century.
Patty says she and Bill discovered this tradition while visiting New Orleans prior to their wedding. The Stump groom cake came with some relief to a family member or two, Patty muses, since Bill wanted a sailboat rather than a bride and groom on top of their wedding cake.
Their daughter, Tricia Stump, takes time from her Stockton University doctorate studies in physical therapy to display the wooden sailboat model that decorated her father’s groom cake. The red and white model is a Cheetah Cat, a wooden boat in the shape of what we now know as the fiberglass catamaran, she explains. The Cheetah Cat was the first boat that Tricia sailed as a child with her dad, she says bittersweetly.
Concerning her father’s passion for sailing and the sea, “Every single painting in our house is a ship. There are ships, plates with ships on them, and ship models everywhere,” Tricia says swiftly. “We even have two sets of ship plates from which we eat!”
Stump bequeathed to his daughter his love for soaring atop the sea in union with the wind.
During her undergraduate years at the University of Virginia, she competed in regattas as a member of the Cavaliers sailing team. Since her parents were both retired from teaching by then, they were able to attend those regattas and cheer Tricia’s team on.
As a youngster, Tricia and her teacher parents traveled widely together during their shared school breaks, visiting the Dakotas, California and Paris among other places, she recalls. The family also spent many happy times at the Yacht Club of Stone Harbor, where Stump served as its secretary for more than 30 years. Patty will now serve as a club board member.
Longtime Yacht Club member and Philadelphia photographer Gene Mopsik first met Stump at the club in the 1980s. Their camaraderie included sailing, socializing and serving. While Stump was the Yacht Club’s longtime secretary, among other roles as needed, Mopsik was a club flag officer, the commodore and a board member over the years.
“Bill was the consummate volunteer,” Mopsik says.
When Stump was no longer able to race, he and Patty lent their Flying Scot boat to another sailor and the couple served as finish boat race officers. “Races can sometimes be very close,” Mopsik explains.
“Bill frequently reminded me and Sam Thomas as we crossed the finish line that if we wanted to finish in a better place, we could always make a contribution to his college tuition fund!” he adds with amusement. “Bill had a very dry sense of humor … some people saw him as a curmudgeon.”
One can’t judge an old salt by his cover.
“Bill was all about preserving the club and club history,” Mopsik says. “He was a kind of institutional memory for the club.”
His friend was “not a spit-and-polish kind of guy,” Mopsik notes. “Bill’s [Flying Scot] boat was old, the sails were blown out and the fittings were tired. All that notwithstanding, in the hands of a good sailor, the boat was always a contender ...
“Bill was a one-of-a-kind guy, a good guy,” concludes his fellow sailor.
Gerald Stump alludes to his brother’s goodness in recalling his earnest efforts to preserve the small-town values they knew in Stone Harbor as children – like that big pot of soup their grandmother set on her back porch to feed the hungry.
“In his public life, Bill had strong feelings about what was best for Stone Harbor,” Gerald says. “He was direct and clear.”
Her father was “very opinionated and stubborn in an endearing way,” Tricia adds.
The town is better for it.
While serving as a Stone Harbor Borough Council member in the late 1990s, Stump also became a founding member of the Stone Harbor Museum. In that role, he and the late Jim Wren created the museum’s original Maritime Annex, a division devoted to the display of local sailing history. Over the years, Stump also served as the museum’s treasurer and membership chair.
More recently, during his tenure as president of the Stone Harbor Board of Education, Stump and others put Seven Mile Beach’s send-receive school relationship into place. This Board of Education decision, which allows local children to attend Stone Harbor Elementary School from kindergarten to fourth grade and Avalon Elementary School from fifth to eighth grade, helped to keep each school open and provide island homeowners with tax-dollar savings.
As he battled cancer in 2019, Stump’s sentimental value for his community expressed itself in a few last wishes. He wanted to watch the Fourth of July fireworks on the beach and attend the Thanksgiving Day parade, his dedicated spouse, daughter, and brother say.
Tricia’s bosses from her days as a lifeguard helped to make her dad’s Independence Day wish come true. The Stone Harbor Beach Patrol reserved a spot for Stump on a deck at lifeguard headquarters, where he joined others in celebrating the Fourth of July. Stone Harbor Police Department personnel ensured that Stump had a warm seat in a parked police car from which to watch the Thanksgiving Day parade. Police officers also assisted with lifting and moving him at his home when he was incapacitated, on occasions when strength and extra hands were needed.
This suggests that Bill Stump’s wishes to preserve small-town values came true, too.
