Steel industry exec Judy Basmajian, of Oyster Bay, dies at 76

People gravitated toward Oyster Bay's Judy Basmajian, and once there wanted to stay in her orbit.

When she married her second husband after divorcing the first, her ex served as the new husband's best man. "Yeah, he did," reminisced Ed Basmajian, her spouse of 42 years until her death, adding, "And his wife was maid of honor."

Energetic and charismatic, a girl from Washington Heights who would go on to a degree from the Sorbonne, Judy Basmajian “was fun. She was a lot of fun. Just a little dynamo,” remembered her longtime friend Liane Guenther, of East Norwich.

She was equally dynamic in her professional life. A force in the male-dominated wholesale steel industry, she would negotiate sales contracts worth millions, then don a hard hat and oversee a delivery. Following decades as a sales executive and salesperson with three steel companies, she joined with two other women in 2006 to found their own firm, 3 Gals Industrial, to sell machinery, equipment, tools and construction and safety products to such accounts as Brookhaven Labs, the Long Island Rail Road, the New York Power Authority and National Grid.

In the midst of this, years ago, she had undergone a double mastectomy to successfully fight breast cancer. But it recently returned, said her son, Ara Basmajian of Oyster Bay, and she died Nov. 4 at age 76 at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan.

“This was not just my mother — this was my best friend,” her son reflected. “She was my mentor, she was my business partner" in a subsequent company she founded "and she was the most loving, caring person I ever met. But also the strongest human being I ever knew.”

“She was very shrewd in terms of business,” said her husband. In fact, in 1994, “she actually started my own business for me," he said.

"I was a not very happy middle manager in the computer industry, and she saw that what I did do very well was help people with their computers for free, because I loved it so much," her husband said. "So without telling me, she put an ad in the local Pennysaver for The Computer Tutor. People started calling me!”

He has since retired from a successful career in tech support and consultancy.

She herself "never slowed down, and she pushed herself to keep working even after she learned her cancer had returned,” Guenther said. “She didn't want to let her customers down.”

Judy Ann Fried was born Dec. 23, 1947, in Manhattan, the middle child between two sons of Muriel and Arnold Fried, a pharmacist. After graduating from George Washington High School in Washington Heights in 1965, she earned a bachelor’s degree from Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey and a master’s in English as a second language from the Sorbonne in Paris, her family said.

There in the City of Lights she began her career in steel at a General Electric subsidiary. She also met her first husband, Bernard Baud, marrying him in the early 1970s and divorcing after six years. She returned to New York in 1980, remaining with GE and moonlighting with her first startup, La Technique, a French-to-English translating service.

Living in Greenwich Village, she met Ed Basmajian, and they married in Switzerland on Aug. 27, 1982.

After subsequently working for two steel companies, she became a salesperson for MSC Industrial Supply for 12 years. In 2009, she left to work full time with 3 Gals. Remaining there, she later started Industrial Strength Industries with her son, supplying tactical search-and-rescue gear to law enforcement agencies and the military.

“She was a nonstop, high-energy person,” said her husband. “She was just as enthusiastic coming in the door after work as she was the first time I met her.”

Her passions were cooking, playing Mexican Train Dominoes and swimming — “everywhere she could go,” said her son, from the pool at the Sid Jacobson JCC in East Hills to Mill Neck Creek to the Gulf of Mexico off the Yucatán Peninsula. There, in Puerto Aventuras and other towns, she and her husband would spend anywhere from a week to an entire winter. 

In addition to her son and husband, she is survived by older brother George, of Washington Heights, and younger brother Peter, of Freehold, New Jersey.

Basmajian was cremated. A memorial service will be held at Planting Fields Arboretum State Historic Park in Oyster Bay Saturday at 1 p.m.