Obituary: Norman Pashoian: Elegant Doorman at Boston Hotel for 66 Years

Pashoian’s father, Norman Sr., and an uncle ran a neighborhood grocery store, which they closed during the Great Depression, when customers could no longer pay their bills.

Even in youth, Pashoian had a taste for sartorial flair. His children were at first mystified to hear he had been a Boy Scout. “I said to my Uncle Eddie, ‘Why would dad join the Boy Scouts? He’d never go camping,’” recalled his son Norman III of Great Falls, Va. “Uncle Ed said, ‘Well, Norm, he loved the uniform. That’s why he joined.’”

He added that his father “would have made a good CIA agent, that’s for sure. In many cases, I learned a lot of information about my father from my uncle, but I learned it 30 or 40 years later.”

Early on at Malden High School, Pashoian hurt his knee badly playing football — an injury that would later curtail his Army service. He couldn’t play sports again until he was a senior and joined the hockey team. He graduated in 1946 and started working at the Ritz on August 4, 1947.

Three years later, he met Claire LeVangie, who worked at the Joseph Antell ladies’ shoe store across Newbury Street from the hotel. Some days she stopped to talk after work. Other times, she slipped love notes into his spiffy Ford convertible. They married in 1954. “If I hadn’t worked at the Ritz, I never would have met her,” he said in 2013 of Claire, who died in 2005. “I courted her for four years, and you don’t do that for just any girl.”

In addition to his sons Norman III and David, Pashoian leaves another son, Mark of Melrose; a daughter, Lisa Pashoian-Cook of Beverly; two brothers, Edward of Malden and Warren of Lynn; and 10 grandchildren.

A funeral Mass was said at St. Joseph Church in Malden. An urn with his ashes was placed in a niche, next to his wife’s urn, in Holy Cross Cemetery in Malden.

Pashoian was devoted to his wife, who “was a beach nut,” their daughter said, so family vacations often were a series of daytrips to Gloucester’s Wingaersheek Beach. In later years, Pashoian and his wife traveled to Caribbean islands, where he could golf.

Outside of family and work, his passions were golf, nice cars, and fine clothing. For decades, he was a member of the Gannon Municipal Golf Course in Lynn, where he was still playing rounds last summer, at 88. He owned a series of fancy cars, most recently, a SLK350 Mercedes-Benz. As for what he wore, “we grew up in a middle-class life in Malden, but you wouldn’t know it, looking at my dad,” his daughter said. “He appreciated the finer things when it came to clothing.”

On his last day at the Taj, Pashoian allowed himself a moment to mourn the decline of elegance. “Nowadays, you can come into a hotel with a knapsack on your back, wearing ripped jeans and sneakers,” he said. “I’ve always liked the old days, when people knew how to dress and always showed up well-groomed and well-tailored.”