Woodward Adams Wickham, Jr. Deceased 1/18/2009 Remembrance:
Woody Wickham died of bile duct cancer on January 18, 2009. Shortly after our 45th reunion, Woody had agreed to be the editor for our 50th reunion class book. He was anxious to read the autobiographical essays of his classmates, many of whom he had not seen in 50 years. Woody had been editor‐in‐chief of the Phillipian and was recognized by his prescient classmates in the Pot Pourri’s senior polls as being among the top three vote‐getters in the categories “done most for Andover,” “future alumni secretary,” and “wit.” Woody was excited about the prospect of our 50th reunion and making it an intellectually stimulating, fun, and funny occasion. The funny part was assured if he had anything to do with it. Woody was congenitally incapable of uttering two consecutive sentences without his understated humor surfacing. Sometimes his humor had an edge to it, and Woody expressed a concern in a StoryCorps interview three months before he died that his “eagerness to tease and embarrass” might have left the incorrect impression that he was unkind. “I have an abhorrence of unkind,” he said in the same interview with Adele Simmons who had hired Woody to be her prime problem‐solver during her successive tenures as president of Hampshire College and the MacArthur Foundation. The last time I talked to Woody on the telephone a few weeks before he died, I kidded him about how his dry and sometimes caustic wit hadn’t fooled any of us who knew him well. He chortled and hung up. His friends always recognized his underlying kindness. His life’s work exemplified it. Woody’s humor and keen intelligence were quickly acknowledged at Harvard where he became editor‐in‐chief of the Harvard Lampoon. One of his roommates at Harvard, in addition to Ed Quattlebaum, Dick Bourne, and Larry Butler, was Dr. Andrew Weil who became a lifelong friend of Woody as he established himself as the father of integrative medicine. After Harvard, Woody taught Latin and English at The Wooster School where he was founding director of Wooster Upward Bound, an educational enrichment program for low‐income teens in the state of Connecticut. He obtained a master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1969. For the next eight years, Woody lived in Mexico, grew a beard, and became what he described as a “superannuated hippy.” For the first five years he wrote reports on the condition of native Americans in the U.S. and Mexico as a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs, and for the following three years was professor and chair of the Department of Education for Universidad de las Americas in Cholula. Woody, the son of a Woodward Adams Wickham, Jr. Deceased 1/18/2009 surgeon, described his life in rural Mexico as that of “a barefoot medic with essentially no medical training.” “To get away with that was quite satisfying,” he said in his last interview with Simmons. Returning to the U.S. in 1978, Woody served as director of development and secretary of the board of trustees for Hampshire College through 1985. After a five‐year stint providing communications consulting for non‐profit organizations, Woody was appointed a vice president of the MacArthur Foundation where he became an influential figure for ten years in the field of independent film and documentary production, and a noted supporter of public broadcasting. As a highly skilled grantmaker, well‐known for spotting promising projects and working with those involved to bring out the best in their efforts, he provided support and guidance for the well‐
known 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams which followed the path of two young Chicago men as they pursued their dream of playing college and perhaps professional basketball. A favorite project of his in recent years was StoryCorps, a public radio initiative in which ordinary citizens interview one another about their lives with the resulting stories archived at the Library of Congress to form an oral history of American life. Woody was an enthusiastic outdoorsman, traveling worldwide in pursuit of his passion for fly‐fishing. He had a much loved second home on the Yellowstone River in Livingston, Montana. There he was active in environmental affairs, serving on the board of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. Frits Dulles and I were fortunate to join Woody and a small group of his friends in July, 2008 for a one‐week horse pack trip into the Metcalf Wilderness west of Yellowstone Park. Woody walked the whole distance and kept us laughing only to learn four weeks later that he had less than six months to live. Before he died, Woody made a donation to the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum in Chicago for the purpose of establishing the Woodward A. Wickham Butterfly Garden which opened in July, 2009. Woody never married and had no children. He is survived by his sister, Susan, who graduated from Abbot, another sister and brother, seven nieces and nephews, and 17 grand nieces and nephews of whom he was very fond. How did Woody feel about Andover? Forty‐six years after firing numerous broadsides against the Andover administration from his lofty editorial perch at the Phillipian, Woody was interviewed by a reporter from the same newspaper. Woody got serious for a moment. “Looking back,” he said, “when I compare Andover to the other [institutions] I’ve been involved with, I think Andover scores at the top, by articulating principles and trying to live up to them.” Wally Winter