Judith Crouch Hughes

Judith Hope Crouch Hughes passed away on July 10, 2026, in Doylestown, PA. Eighty-eight years young, she was a soft-spoken but fierce warrior for good, an extraordinary friend to so many, with one of the brightest spirits and curious minds imaginable.

Born in New York City to Paul Austin Crouch and Ruth LeComte Taylor, Judy grew up in Scarsdale, where her talent for cultivating and keeping close, meaningful friendships began. Her collection of faded black & white photos, programs, newspaper clippings, and ephemera capture a lively, school-centered social life with Edgemont and Bronxville friends: one clipping recounts her 7th birthday party with a rented pony who felt anti-social that day, and a journal entry shares how she blithely clipped flowers from neighbors’ houses, tying ribbons around the ‘posies’, and then offered them for sale to the same neighbors.

Judy and her brother Leonard “Len” Crouch spent every summer at the family’s rustic Adirondack camp. For 87 of her 88 years, she made that same trek to the deep woods and community of Twitchell Lake. Over time, canoe-bobbing, waitressing at the Twitchell Lake Inn and teenage evenings playing favorites like “Celery Stalks at Midnight” on an old record player gave way to sitting on the dock, listening for the loons, and watching her grandkids build the bonfires.

At Cornell University she met and married Minor “Skip” Hughes. The two travelled cross-country to California, before returning to the East Coast, newly pregnant with the first of their six children. They moved the young family to Roosevelt, NJ, an unusual New Deal resettlement for low-income, mostly Jewish families from the NYC garment district. Roosevelt’s creative, and communal spirit gave Judy ten of her happiest years, marked by deep connections and an awakened sense of the world and where she fit in it. The death of their daughter Kelly Bronwyn Hughes led to an abrupt move to the Philadelphia suburbs, where Judy lived for the next 50+ years.

The Hughes house was filled with music – Skip loved classical and jazz, while Judy preferred the Weavers, Little Richard, Pete Seeger, Creedence, and Odetta. She found freedom in the open road, late night country drives and trips to the Jersey shore, often pulling over to pick cattails, much to the chagrin of the kids packed into a beat-up Country Squire. Most evenings ended with her sharing favorites books -–The Snowy Day, My Father’s Dragon, The Country Bunny and The Little Gold Shoes.

The volatile sixties, Watergate and Roosevelt’s activism shaped Judy style of grassroots civic engagement: over the next 60 years she’d work for local libraries, public schools, civil rights and environmental organizations as well as supporting the platforms of her beloved Democratic Party. She was a card-carrying member of the ACLU and would talk sincerely to anyone about any issue she deemed important. While she hated the spotlight, she never shied away from the gritty, granular work of local politics – sending letters to the editor, holding coffee klatches and campaigning door-to-door. As recently as 2024, she cut off a phone call saying ‘Sorry, I need to run. I’m doing voter registration and then watering the plants in downtown Ambler’.

Somehow she squeezed it all in – endless kid drop-offs, Friends of Library sales, her curated film series, school programs, Save-this-Tree posters, and always a side-hustle… bookkeeper, librarian, department store sales, waitressing – to make ends meet. In the 1990s she returned to college for the degree she had abandoned and received a BA with honors from Chestnut Hill College. Her idea of indulgence was to lie outside in the cool grass on a hot night or to float gently across Twitchell Lake currents. It comes as no surprise that she asked that The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry be shared.

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

One of her last requests was that in lieu of any kind of celebration of her life, her friends would just know how grateful she was for their love and friendship. She was one of a kind and will be deeply missed by her many friends and family -- daughter Sheila Hughes (Peter Kepler), Minor Ivins (‘Mike’) Hughes III (Mary Helen), Kathleen (‘Kathy’) Hughes, Colleen Hughes and David Hughes (Ollie Green); Grandchildren Bryn Kepler (Caleb Strickland), Charlotte Kepler (Jonathan Pruiett) ; Dylan Hughes (Jaclyn), Benjamin Hughes (Laura), Anna Hughes (Shane Dearmond), and Lauren Kibler; and great-grandchildren Alison Hughes, Caitlin Hughes, and Violet Hughes.