Alison Hain, adventure-loving Long Islander devoted to family, dies at 81

Throughout a life lived studying and working in Geneva, Tehran and less exotic ports of call like Poughkeepsie, Long Islander Alison Hain produced and edited educational materials professionally and, in a way, personally.

Jocelyn Wenk, of Cold Spring Harbor, one of Hain's two daughters, said her mother instilled in her children an appreciation for the arts and the deeper meaning of celebrating holidays together as a family.

"I didn't listen to any music except Classical until maybe late middle school, high school," Wenk told Newsday.

On a typical day, she and her sister, Alexia Hain, of upstate Ithaca, "would learn about the Mahler symphony that my parents listened to."

When Wenk became a parent and would send her mother photos of her children in Halloween costumes, "She would write back, ‘Oh, it is All Hallows’ Eve, the eve of All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, the days to remember those in our family who have gone before us.’ ”

Alison Hain, who died of natural causes at age 81 on Oct. 12 at the Mary Ann Tully Hospice Inn in Melville, "just loved to learn about things," said longtime family friend Henry Clark, of Oyster Bay. "But at the same time, she had this wonderful, ironic sense of humor." Calling her "idealistic," Clark said Hain "always wanted to educate others or inform others of what is the value in, let's say, architecture of old buildings."

'Charismatic together'

Hain and her husband, Frank Hain, who died in 2023, "were enormously charismatic together," added Clark’s wife, Harriet Gerard Clark, executive director of the Raynham Hall Museum in Oyster Bay.

"They were a team," she added. "They projected joy, principled joy."

Born Alison Ann Weigel in Cincinnati on Jan. 24, 1944, Hain was the eldest of three daughters of Mary Laura Sullivan Weigel and Henry Bourke Weigel. Her father was an architect who served as coordinator on the design of the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan and, as a partner in the firm Damaz & Weigel in the 1960s, developed the master plan and designed the student union, fine arts center and other buildings at what was then SUNY at Stony Brook, now Stony Brook University.

The peripatetic family by then had moved to New Rochelle and, later, Briarcliff Manor, where Hain attended high school. She graduated from Vassar College, in Poughkeepsie, in 1966 with a bachelor’s cum laude in history, then pursued but did not complete a graduate degree at the University of Geneva, in Switzerland.

She began a career in educational media at Guidance Associates and affiliated companies upstate, producing and editing educational sound film strips. In the early 1970s, she met fellow Sierra Club member Frank Leslie Hain Jr. on a hike on Bear Mountain in the Hudson Valley, and the two married in 1974.

Frank Hain, a computer‐design engineer, worked for RCA Global Communications, including a yearslong stint in Tehran, Iran, under contract to the Shah, returning home shortly before the Iranian Revolution. Alison Hain, while in Iran, taught English as a second language to Iranian engineers.

A restless nature

Following Alison Hain’s restless nature, the family moved frequently.

"My father was a saint," Wenk said of his accommodating his spouse. They would have homes in Cold Spring Harbor, Laurel Hollow and Syosset as well as upstate in Coreys, Essex, South Salem, Trumansburg and Westport. In the 1980s, Alison Hain wrote newsletters for the Cold Spring Harbor and Merrick school districts, and, her family said, produced the video "A School in Time and Place" for the 1990 bicentennial of Syosset’s West Side School.

Among other pursuits, Hain worked in development for the nonprofit Essex Community Heritage Organization (ECHO), now Historic Essex, her family said. In the 2010s, she wrote articles for the Press-Republican newspaper in upstate Plattsburgh, and, with her husband, worked on a planned rural development in upstate Elizabethtown.

A lover of gardening, Hain belonged to three Garden Club of America clubs: Three Harbors Garden Club in Cold Spring Harbor and one each in New Canaan, Connecticut, and upstate Lake Placid. Later in life, she lived at Christian Fellowship House in Syosset.

In addition to her daughters, Alison Hain is survived by sisters Lucia Weigel Hrinyak, of Hanover, Pennsylvania, and Andrea Weigel Clark, of Ridgeland, South Carolina; and four grandchildren.

Services were private. Hain was buried at Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla in Westchester County. A private memorial Mass was celebrated Saturday at the Church of the Magdalene in Pocantico Hills in Westchester County.