Stow, MA

John Shebell, 75, of Stow MA passed away peacefully surrounded by family on December 7, 2022. He had been in declining health.

He was born on July 1, 1947 in Canton, MA and moved to Brattleboro Vermont in his early teens. In high school he met and married his childhood sweetheart, Melinda (Shippee) Shebell when they were alphabetically assigned to the same study hall table. They were married for 55 years.

John graduated as Salutatorian from BUHS in 1965 and later received a BS degree from Boston University along with the Silver Medal for scholastic excellence.

John spent most of his career working for Digital Equipment Corp. where he was a Corporate Consulting Engineer. He led pioneering development of remote telemetry methods for support delivery, and the design of self-healing memory subsystems. He later became the Group Manager of Reliability/Maintainability Programs including Site Planning, Artificial Intelligence applications for service delivery, and differential analysis methods for fault diagnosis of complex systems. He also gave occasional graduate level seminars at universities in the US and Europe on system engineering topics. In the late 1980's John served as a consultant to the US Congress through the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, and to other Government departments on topics relating to cyber security and worldwide computer network deployment.

The family moved to Stow MA in 1979 where he served on the Stow Finance Committee and a member of the Board of Directors of the Juniper Hill Water Company.  Since 2005 John and Melinda split their time living in beautiful Cape Breton Nova Scotia for half of the year.

In addition to his wife, John is survived by his son Darren Shebell of Cincinnati OH, his daughter Donica Shebell of Maynard MA, his sister Joanne Clark and her husband Darrell of Vernon VT, and his two fun loving dogs, Piper and Ceilidh. Private services are planned. John was an avid and voracious reader. Any donations in his name to the Friends of the Randall Library in Stow would be gratefully accepted and appreciated. Tighe Hamilton Regional Funeral Home, 50 Central Street, Hudson, MA  is honored to be assisting the family with arrangements.