From the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror obituary: Known as “Bam,” Henry Bancel La Farge, of Nantucket, died Thursday, Feb. 26, 2015 at Tufts Medical Center in Boston of a stroke. He was 65. 

Although he was so much a part of the fabric of Nantucket and Tuckernuck islands, Bam grew up in New Canaan, Conn. Bam attended Portsmouth Priory, where he took a particular interest in Latin. He would have a lifelong appreciation of the Benedictines who taught him there. He went on to Harvard College, and during his time there, he led a varied life, working, for instance, at Orson Welles Cinema and seeing favorite musicians live at the Newport Folk Festival. He graduated in 1971 with a degree in anthropology.

During summers at family homes on Lake Titus in the Adirondacks and on Tuckernuck Island, Bam shadowed local craftsmen and learned about carpentry. After college, he took up woodworking and carpentry as a profession. In the early 1970s, he renovated abandoned buildings in West Philadelphia, Pa. There he connected with a like-minded community and found lifelong friends. 

In 1976, drawn back to his beloved Tuckernuck, Bam moved to Nantucket year-round, earning a living as a carpenter and, early on, as an offshore sea scalloper. Bam met Janine “Nini” La Farge, another Connecticut native, who was then working as a weaver at Nantucket Looms. They married on Tuckernuck in 1981. On Nantucket, Bam found the close-knit, sustaining community he had always craved.

Bam and Nini raised a family of three children on the island, and he was a tirelessly devoted father. He cooked his children breakfast every morning, mastering poached eggs and over-buttering Portuguese toast. During so many walks through Squam Swamp and sails to Tuckernuck and baseball games, he instilled his values. He passed along his love for the natural world, attempting to teach his children the Latin names of butterflies and oak trees and walking barefoot into bushes to pick huckleberries. 

He believed in having a low environmental impact, under-powering his motorboat and creating a camp-style system for cooking and sleeping in his boathouse. He made it clear that appearances weren’t everything, that one could still be respected while wearing electrical-taped glasses and a ripped T-shirt (or no T-shirt at all) and missing a front tooth.