Remembering Bill

Remarks by Art Watson ’64 on the Peoples Memorial website related to the Celebration of Bill’s Life in Seattle on July 21, 2012:

I was a member of the class of 1964 at Noble and Greenough School, in Dedham Massachusetts. As it happened, my years there coincided almost exactly with the years that Bill Biddle served on the Nobles faculty.

I never thought of “Mr. Biddle” exactly as a mentor, but he had a very profound influence on my life. For me he provided avenues for personal growth and achievement while at Nobles that I am certain were extremely unusual in such places at that time, and certainly unique in my experience. Without them, my time there, as a non-cool non-athlete, would have been so much different, and certainly much less memorable.

I remember first becoming really aware of the Nobles Outing Club upon being introduced to the Club’s journals, in which each trip was described in great detail. Among these early memories is that of a sequence of entries, accompanied by clippings from the Boston Globe, memorializing some kind of dust-up in an exchange of letters-to-the editor between the then-student President, Peter Ward, and some other reader, in which the reader accused Peter of “bumptious certitude” – an expression new to me, but which I have never forgotten.

I do not recall what the issue was, but I’m sure that Bill enjoyed this exchange immensely and was proud of the confidence he had engendered in a bunch of suburban schoolboys venturing out into the wilds of the Whites. Later, it would be my honor to contribute to those journal entries, and my pride in completing some of our trips, many of them in the dead of winter, endures still.

Bill had such tremendous enthusiasm for life! And such energy to explore the out-of-doors and impart its wonders to us poor teen-agers, burdened as we were with homework, social angst, and parents who simply could not understand what impelled us to rise to the challenges that Bill presented to us as matters of fact, things that could be done and we would simply do them.

Silly me, I was looking so much forward to making sure that Bill was at our upcoming big reunion at Nobles. I could have contacted him to let him know how much I was looking forward to seeing him again after many years, but I didn’t. I feel a great sense of loss that I did not maintain contact with him as I should have. In retrospect, I can see that at Nobles he was offering examples of other paths in life that might be followed, paths that I perhaps should have considered more carefully, paths of joy and wisdom.

I hope to meet you again up on the ridge line, Bill.