James Joseph Sugg, 62, died peacefully in his sleep at his home in San Jose, California on Dec. 22, 2024. Born in Raleigh, North Carolina on Aug. 11, 1962, the family eventually settled in Oak Park, where he attended Longfellow Elementary and Oak Park and River Forest High School, graduating in 1979. He attended the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, but decided to enter the growing computer industry, and moved back to Chicago, where he began his career at Allstate, before moving to the Silicon Valley area in 1997.
He married his wife, Vicki Olsen, of San Diego, in March of 1998, after having been introduced by mutual friends, Mark and Kristen Coe, of River Forest. Jim worked for more than 20 years as a senior program director for a series of companies, including Juniper Networks, Cisco Systems, and Palo Alto Networks.
He kept in touch with his high school and college friends, a group who called themselves The Good Buddies, and he was the best man in each of their weddings. In California, he formed another group of devoted friends, who provided him with much needed support when he lost his wife Vicki in 2019, after a long-term illness, for whom he was a devoted caregiver.
After her death, he traveled, including spending a great deal of time back in Oak Park, taking up the mantle of family patriarch following his father’s death in 2020.
Jim is survived by his mother, Charlotte Sugg; his brother, Mark Sugg; his sisters, Mary (Sugg) Carlin and Ann Sugg; and his nieces and nephews, Stephanie and Sophia Carlin, Collin and Erin Sugg, and Aidan Bertocchini.
A celebration of Jim’s life will take place in March at Ascension Church in Oak Park. Those wishing to make a donation in his honor are requested to do so at www.betheboat.org, a charity formed in the memory of one of Jim’s “adopted” nephews, Hunter Quigley Coe, who died tragically in 2015.