WILDER — Judith Rocchio’s morning routine began with two newspapers: the New York Times and the Valley News. She read them end to end and, when moved, would dash off a letter to the opinion page of this newspaper, expressing where she stood on a national or local issue. Maybe it was the New Yorker in her, maybe it was her character, maybe both, but Rocchio could not let a good opinion go to waste.
Over the decades, Rocchio urged this paper in letters to its Forum page to “follow up,” “look further,” and take a “little extra effort,” an exhortation that she also directed outward at the world. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005, she asked in a letter to the Forum page how the government was going to find those missing in the floods: “Who is looking? Is there a plan to get them to the polls next month?”
When former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean began his race in 2004 for the Democratic presidential nomination, Rocchio, a lifelong Democrat and volunteer organizer and fundraiser for the party, wrote to the Forum that perhaps now the U.S. could live up to the ideals in which she strongly believed: “equal opportunity and an end to poverty for all Americans.”
Civic duty was uppermost in her mind because wherever she looked, there were problems to be solved and time was fleeting.
Judith (Judy) Elaine Gold Rocchio died at age 87 on July 27, 2025 in Hillsborough County Nursing Home in New Hampshire, where she received end-of-life care after leaving her home in Wilder. As part of her final bequest, she donated her body to the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College.
“She was so excited about that,” said her daughter, Anne Rocchio-Dodge, who lives in New Boston, N.H., near the Hillsborough nursing home. Her mother joked that “my backup is Harvard, but they don’t need me.”
Rocchio was the only child of Rose and Irving Gold, both of whose families had been Jewish emigrés from Eastern Europe to New York. Rocchio was born in 1937 in Brooklyn and graduated from Forest Hills High School in Queens. Native New Yorker was a title she wore with pride, even though her trajectory took her north to Vermont and New Hampshire, a region she grew to love deeply for its lakes and mountains.
Her father was an anesthesiologist who imbued in his daughter a lifelong love of science and medicine. When Judy was young, said Rocchio-Dodge, Irving Gold would wake his daughter in the middle of the night: “‘I just got a call. I have an appendectomy. Do you want to go watch?’” Rocchio’s father died from cancer when she was 15, and her mother remarried.
At the same age, Rocchio, petite with short, curly dark hair and an intensity of gaze, entered the University of Rhode Island, majoring in English and participating in musical theater. There, she met her husband-to-be, Anthony Rocchio, a native Rhode Islander. The courtship was swift and they married in 1958.
“They were both very passionate and very young and got married very fast,” said Rocchio-Dodge. Judy’s mother disapproved of her marrying outside Judaism and refused to go to the wedding. Because Anthony’s parents and extended family were welcoming, Judy and Anthony’s children were raised, de facto, in the Catholic faith, although Judy took care to introduce the children to Judaism.
Nonetheless, Rocchio-Dodge recalled, Judy advised her children that “God doesn’t care what building you walk into.” All religions have their virtues and drawbacks: the key, said Rocchio-Dodge, was to “be kind, understanding and patient.” Later in life, Rocchio’s license plate read tzedakah, a Hebrew phrase that signifies justice, charity and good deeds.
The Rocchios moved to northern Vermont in 1963. Anthony taught English in the Montpelier high school while Judy taught art in Mad River Valley elementary schools. She introduced her children to the scores of Broadway musicals – “42nd Street,” “Annie,” “West Side Story,” “A Chorus Line” – and painted oils and watercolors that hung on the walls of her last home in Wilder.
By the time the marriage ended in 1974, there were four children. After the divorce, Rocchio moved south to Woodstock and then to Hanover, even as her children grew up and left home.
In the mid-1980s, Rocchio began working at the Dartmouth Medical School, now the Geisel School of Medicine, and after that the Norris Cotton Cancer Center, now Dartmouth Cancer Center, in Lebanon.
“She knew everybody, and she knew how to get things done,” said Dr. Joseph F. O’Donnell, emeritus professor of medicine and surgery, and an associate dean, at the Geisel School of Medicine.
Recognizing her skills, energy, and interest in and empathy for patients, the powers-that-be changed Rocchio’s job title from “administrative assistant” to “resource access facilitator,” a description that acknowledged her work answering a cancer patient helpline, and organizing transportation for patients in New Hampshire and Vermont to and from the center.
When Rocchio began working with others at the cancer center to organize the Audrey Prouty Century Ride, the annual fundraiser, “that was where a lot of her assets really came to shine,” said Brenda Berube, who first hired and supervised Rocchio at the cancer center, and became a lifelong friend. “At the time we weren’t able to purchase anything, and she would have to solicit and get all kinds of products and services. She was very, very effective at that.”
With Rocchio in the mix, “things moved along and people worked together. There was a frequent discovery of new ways of doing things that were better,” said Dr. O. Ross McIntyre, former director of the Norris Cotton Cancer Center.
Even when Rocchio was “very much an old lady, she would say, ‘I can help you. I’m a resource access facilitator, you know,’” said her daughter Tina Rocchio.
When Rocchio-Dodge took her mother to doctors appointments, “we could not go from point A to point B directly,” said Rocchio-Dodge. “We had to stop. She’d say, ‘Oh, I have to introduce you to this person.’ She thought of everybody in her life as a very important person.”
And the people who had worked with her remembered her. Tina Rocchio recalled taking her elderly mother to lunch near Mascoma Lake. A woman in a kayak paddled over, exclaiming how happy she was to see Judy Rocchio. As a nurse, she had worked with Rocchio at the cancer center. She extolled Rocchio’s virtues, saying, in essence, “ ‘this woman could do anything, she could make anything happen.’ That’s basically what we’re saying about her, you know? If there wasn’t a way, she’d find a way,” Tina Rocchio said.
Rocchio threw her formidable energy into numerous Upper Valley organizations, acting as a founding board member for Advance Transit and helping to found the Congregation Shir Shalom synagogue in Woodstock. She was also a member of the Upper Valley Jewish Community in Hanover, attending services and seders at both, and she joined the Hanover Lions Club.
When it came to getting the last word, she had a New Yorker’s fast draw. Once Tina Rocchio gave her mother a ride; when she parked the car, her mother looked at the space she’d have to negotiate between the car and the sidewalk.
“What? Do I have to take a cab to the sidewalk?” Rocchio said. She once told Rocchio-Dodge, “You’re too sweet.”
At the same time, her son Paul Rocchio said, when he went away to college and was miserable his first year, he would call his mother collect. “ She would always get on the phone and would always calm me down. She did that my entire life.”
The children were accustomed to her sardonic nature. Rocchio-Dodge asked her mother once why she was so outspoken. “That’s easy,” Rocchio said. “I’m from New York.”
She brought the same bluntness to her political activism, rallying people to the campaigns of Howard Dean and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., among others. When a Republican outsider challenged Sanders for his Congressional seat in 2006, invoking the name of the late and much esteemed U.S. Sen. George Aiken, R-Vt., Rocchio fired off a letter to the Forum page. “You have some nerve introducing Sen. Aiken’s name into your campaign,” she asserted.
Even as it became more difficult for her to move around, she read and watched the news voraciously. If people suggested she not consume so much news, she would say, “ ‘My Daddy raised me to be a flagwaver, and I’m a flagwaver.’ She thought it was her duty,” said her son Paul Rocchio.
Towards the end of her life, she insisted that she be allowed to stay in her one-level home in Wilder, Paul Rocchio said. The family installed cameras to keep an eye on her.
Rocchio-Dodge would catch her mother, seated in a kitchen chair, reading steadily for hours. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s book “Madam Secretary” occupied her time as did Streisand’s memoir, “My Name is Barbra,” another Brooklynite with whom Rocchio felt a kind of spiritual kinship. Her children would call her to wish her good night and remind her to go to bed.
“Soon,” she’d tell them. “But I want to read just a little while longer.”