Frank S. DiGirolamo died on Feb. 6, 2025 at his Provincetown home after a 14-year battle with Alzheimer’s disease. He watched the inauguration in Washington on Jan. 20, after which “he went to sleep and never woke up,” said his wife, Jane Paradise. He was 84.
Jane chronicled Frank’s Alzheimer’s years in heart-rending photographs and snippets of stripped-down, powerful dialogue posted on Instagram. In 2021, K.C. Myers wrote about Jane’s documentation of those years in the Independent, quoting one bit of dialogue in which Jane said, “I need you to get your shoes on,” and Frank replied, “I’m waiting for me.”
The son of Antonio DiGirolamo and Ada Marchegiani DiGirolamo, Frank was born on July 23, 1940 in Boston, where he grew up. His father owned the Dover Street Tavern, which until 1969 was legally a “for men only” establishment. When that restriction was made illegal, Antonio protested, fearing he’d lose business, Jane said.
Frank learned to play the violin when he was young, and he became the concertmaster of the orchestra at the Boston Latin School. After graduating in 1958, Frank went to Bowdoin College in Maine against the wishes of his father, who wanted him to go to Harvard and live at home. At Bowdoin, he studied government and economics and played lacrosse. That decision, he wrote in a biographical note in a Boston Latin School 50th reunion report, “I never regretted for one moment. It was the right place for me.”
He graduated in 1962 and enrolled in the M.B.A. program at Columbia, but, running out of money, he transferred to Rutgers, where he completed his M.B.A. He moved back to New York to work as a staff accountant at Price Waterhouse.
“I loved the pace and style of New York,” Frank wrote, “and the literary and arts scene was something I’d never experienced.” But he missed Boston and returned in 1972.
In 1973, Frank went into business with a few partners in the consumer electronics industry as a founder of Epicure Products in Newburyport; he served as chief financial officer from 1973 to 1981 and then as chief executive officer until 1991, staying on after the company was bought by Harman in 1988. He left Harman and moved to San Francisco to work as CEO for Silver Metal Products in Livermore, Calif. and then as chief operating officer at Intellisys Group in Mountain View, Calif.
Jane Paradise, a Connecticut native, was living in San Francisco at the time, and Frank met her during a Friends of the Library walking tour. They got to talking, and Frank invited her and her two Connecticut visitors to join him for lunch. The lunch led to a home-cooked meal at Frank’s place.
“In 1999,” Frank wrote, “I married a wonderful woman.”
“He said, ‘Let’s get married’ on a phone call from London,” Jane wrote in an email. “I emailed Frank our vows,” she added, and “he said as long as you remove God from them.” She did so, then picked a minister from the yellow pages and invited family and a few friends to the ceremony at the condo they had recently bought together. Frank flew in from London, they married, then he flew back. “We were always inseparable even when we lived separately,” Jane wrote.
Jane soon joined Frank in London, where he was the CEO at KEF/Celeston Audio, Ltd., two of the U.K.’s oldest consumer audio brands. In a 2002 trade magazine interview, Frank explained how he went about re-energizing the business by encouraging a culture of risk-taking.
“You will not get into trouble for making a mistake, but you will for not acting,” he said. In 2005, he moved to Hong Kong to work in the Asian markets.
Beginning in 2007, the year of Frank’s retirement, he and Jane spent their summers on the Outer Cape, a dream of Frank’s since his childhood in Boston. In 2011, his Alzheimer’s symptoms began to appear, and in 2015, he and Jane settled in Provincetown. They wanted a sense of community, Jane told Myers in 2021.
Frank embraced his life in Provincetown. He enjoyed sailing, and he gardened with gusto, covering the deck of his home with pots of red geraniums; he loved cooking blueberry pancakes for his friends’ kids when they visited; and dining out was a comfort. That sense of community he and Jane sought here was especially evident in how welcoming and respectful the bartenders and staff of the Mews, Mac’s Fish House, and Napi’s were to Frank, no matter how far his disease had progressed.
Frank was deeply engaged with politics and economics, influenced by his father’s political leanings — Frank told Jane that his father once ran for governor of Massachusetts as a socialist, as did his uncle for lieutenant governor — and solidified by his undergraduate studies. “He was a fanatical reader of the New York Times and The Economist,” Jane said. During their London years, “He knew more about Tony Blair than Blair knew about himself,” she added.
“I will take with me his generosity and acceptance of me at all moments, probably because he was at peace in those moments himself,” said Frank’s niece, Renee. “He would take me and my friends out to dinner, always with oysters, and have parties he didn’t necessarily agree to with us at his house. He was, however, always late to ticketed events.”
Frank is survived by his wife, Jane Paradise of Provincetown; son Luke DiGirolamo of Jamaica Plain; daughter Elizabeth DiGirolamo of Vershire, Vt.; brother Edward DiGirolamo of Boston; brother-in-law Edward Paradise of Apex, N.C.; niece Renee Paradise, husband Christopher Finneral, and their daughter Margaux of New York City; and nephew Edward Paradise, wife Kathryn, and their children, Harper and Henry, of Cary, N.C.
The family expresses its thanks to Frank’s caregivers, Amanda Young, Hilary McHugh, and Tina Michaud.
In lieu of flowers, donations in Frank’s memory can be made to the Alzheimer’s Family Support Center, 2095 Main St., Brewster 02631 or to the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, 460 Commercial St., Provincetown, 02657.
