Remembering Bill

Remarks by Peter Ward ’61 on the Peoples Memorial website related to the Celebration of Bill’s Life in Seattle on July 21, 2012:

I was one of Bill’s first students when he arrived at Nobles to teach fifth-class (eighth-grade) English in September, 1956. We were 13; he was 26, among the youngest faculty. I was immediately drawn to his energy and enthusiasm both in class and in life. When we discovered our mutual interest in nature and mountains, we became good friends, the closest friendship I had with any of the many excellent teachers at Nobles. Bill was my primary mentor from 1956-1961, always encouraging me to do my best and simply expecting my best effort. Plus he played no small part in my decision to go to Dartmouth, a great choice for me.

In early 1957, Bill and I and one other non-Nobles person set out on snowshoes for Crag Camp, high on the north flank of Mt Adams in New Hampshire. The snow was unusually deep, the trail difficult to find, and our snowshoe bindings kept failing. Finally we had to admit we were lost and had to bivouac under a small army poncho stretched to a pole between two trees. When we woke in the morning our fire pit had sunk 6 feet into the snow. When we returned in the spring, the pole between the trees was 10 feet off the ground!

Bill got both of us involved with a few eager winter climbers in the Appalachian Mountain Club led by Bob Collin, a cancer researcher. I was the youngest and Bill was probably the second youngest. We spent many winter weekends over the next few years climbing 4000 foot peaks throughout New Hampshire, sometimes together, sometimes apart. With Bill’s encouragement, I designed more effective snowshoe bindings made with leftover leather from Peter Limmer and Sons boot makers and ended up selling around 50 pairs over the next eight years.

In Fall, 1958, after the football/soccer season, Bill led 14 of us every afternoon chopping wood, clearing brush, and building a bench near a small pond along the Nobles Bridge-Street driveway. It was around that time that Bill and I lobbied to form the Nobles Outing Club with trips to the Presidentials in New Hampshire by spring 1960. Bill was the faculty adviser to the Outing Club until he left Nobles. He had a wonderful way of letting the students lead, expecting them to do it well, and gently coaching for improvement.

Dave Mittell, a classmate and life-long journalist recently put it this way in his classic pithy prose: “Bill, who meant a lot to a lot of boys who didn’t have a lot of teachers who meant a lot to them.” Many of us who were not the stars of the typical combative sports were drawn to Bill by his genuine excitement, his gentle style of drawing us out, of getting us to try harder in school and in nature. He wasn’t on some pedestal. He was just amongst us, helping us grow, learn, try, while having fun. He was the primary faculty member, and one of the few still living, to come to our 50th reunion in May 2011 and I think it meant as much to him as it did to so many of us.

I lost track of Bill over many decades as I moved west, developing my career, but thanks to Dave Mittell I caught up with him almost two decades ago and have stopped by to see him whenever passing through Seattle, including last December and this May. He lived a full life, meant a lot to so many students and others over so many years. My warmest wishes to his family including both wonderful Barbaras.