In Memoriam
Jerald L. Stevens
Jerry Stevens
Jerry Stevens
1963 graduation
Jerald L. Stevens
Jerald L. Stevens, 73, died at his home in Chester, Vermont, on Sept. 5, 2014.
Jerry loved ideas, people, and community. Active as a volunteer in the neighboring town of Grafton, he expressed his love of books and learning as a trustee of the Grafton Library, his enjoyment of a good party through his promotion of the Grafton Day Celebration, and his willingness to cause a ruckus in passions like his alternative plan for the abandoned Red Church building.
Although variously describing himself as an atheist and a Buddhist, he was active at and a deacon of the Grafton Church. Swimming and his keen intellect led him from Bloomington, Illinois, to Yale. He graduated from Yale College in 1963, from the Harvard Business School in 1967, and worked in private finance. Jerry was appointed at age 33 as Welfare Commissioner and then as Secretary of Human Services by Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. Five years later he became the Vice President of Finance and Administration at Yale University.
Jerry returned to the private sector as President of Vanguard Investments in 1983. He retired to Vermont in 1994. Always an athlete and lover of things physical, Jerry played rugby in college, ran the Boston marathon in the 1970s, biked to work before it was cool, and became a master club rower in his 50s. Last year he was still bench-pressing 200 lbs.
Jerry was ever curious about and generous with others, and appreciative of their individual perspectives, insights, and strengths. He was a confidante and catalyst for many, including his partner, Michelle Dufort, four siblings, children (Jake, Peter, Will, and Kate), his former wife, Barbara, and their six grandchildren (Louisa, Dashiell, Katharine, Maggie, Sally and Sabina). He was predeceased by his parents, Louis Schenck Stevens and Mary Frances Dunne Stevens. SERVICES:
A memorial service will be held at the Grafton Church in
Grafton, VT on September 27, 2014 at 11 a.m. Donations in his memory may be
made to the Jerald L. Stevens Memorial Fund c/o Grafton Library, P.O. Box
129 Grafton, Vermont 05146
Published in the Rutland Herald on Sept. 10, 2014
Jerald L. "Jerry" Stevens, 73, died Sept. 5, 2014, at his home from melanoma.
He was born June 6, 1941, in Bloomington, IL, the son of Louis Schenck Stevens and Mary Frances Dunne Stevens. He received a Bachelor's Degree from Yale College in 1963 and Masters of Business Administration from Harvard University in 1967.
He was Commissioner of Public Welfare and Secretary of Human Services in Massachusetts in the 1970s, Vice President of Administration and Finance at Yale University from 1978 to 1982 and then President and Chief Operating Officer of Vanguard Investments from 1982 to 1985.
He retired to Vermont in 1994. He was a trustee of the Grafton (VT) Library and deacon of the Grafton Church. He loved to read, run, bike and row. He was ever curious about and generous with others.
Survivors include his partner, Michelle Dufort of Grafton; his former wife and mother of their children, Barbara Ray Stevens of Washington, D.C.; his four children, Jacob Stevens of Brooklyn, NY, Peter Stevens of Concord, Mass., William Stevens of San Francisco, CA, and Katharine Stevens of Genga, Italy; his siblings, Robert Stevens of Freeport, ME, James Stevens and Stephen Stevens of Bloomington, IL, and Ann Sweeney of Keller, TX; and six grandchildren, Louisa, Dashiell, Katharine, Sally, Margaret and Sabina.
Jerry Stevens lost his 18-year battle with melanoma at his home in Chester, VT, on September 5. A memorial service was held at the Grafton Church on the 27th. Phil Stevens reminisced about his roommate and fellow swimmer, and read some remarks sent by John Lahr, another roommate. Both texts are available at the class website. Lahr could not attend the service, because he was on a book tour following publication of his long-awaited new biography of Tennessee Williams. Peter de Bretteville and Gar Murtha also attended the service. Jerry’s daughter Kate said that he wanted his classmates to know that he had established the Jerald L. Stevens Memorial Fund at the Grafton Library, P.O. Box 129, Grafton, VT 05146.
Remarks made by Phil Stevens at the memorial service for Jerry Stevens, Grafton Church, Grafton, VT, September 27.
I have a written message from John Lahr, who kept much closer contact with Jerry than any of the rest of his Yale roommates – and indeed John was most diligent in trying to keep us all connected after graduation. We all would second John’s sentiments, but before I read them, I want to insert a few of my own. But first, an apologia. I think my theology is pretty similar to Jerry’s – I’m not much of a theist; and I, too am active and an officer in a church. Like Jerry, I find no conflict there. The church is a social institution. But I was raised in a New England Congregational Church like this one, and never in my wildest dreams would I ever have imagined that I would say in a church certain words that are contained in both my and John’s remarks. I will justify my use of those words in two ways: 1) today is Saturday; and 2) We used obscenities like these in our banter with each other as exclusive terms – they were part of what I might call a “culture of endearment” at Yale in the early 1960s. So, here we go.
I knew Jerry pretty well for four years at Yale. He and I were roommates for two of them. In our junior year five of the most unlikely roommates you can imagine shared quarters in Branford College. I, athlete and straight arrow; Jerry, athlete and boisterous hail-fellow-well-met; Johnnie Bowen, singer, later MD and renowned surgeon, died of cancer in 2013; Dick Thieriot, businessman; Lahr, writer.
We were all high achievers in our own areas, all very different, but we got along well. Let me draw one image for you that I think conveys our camaraderie. We hired a photographer to come to our room to photograph us for a Christmas card. We all lay side by side on our fold-out couch bed, in T-shirts, under an old bright rainbow Afghan made by my grandmother: Jerry, with a pipe in his mouth; Thieriot in a night cap, nestled in the crook of my arm, and Johnnie Bowen, all holding lit candles, and all dead asleep. And John Lahr, standing on one leg on the back of the couch over our heads, grinning broadly – what we called a “shit-eating grin,” his other leg raised like the Dancing Shiva, wearing only blue oxford boxers and a T-shirt, arms in ridiculous arabesque. In case anyone missed the message, on his T-shirt he had written, “Sugar Plum.” It was priceless. I still have it, and cherish it.
Bowen left us the next year to accept the Senior privilege of a single room, so that last year we were four. But Jerry and I had been fellow swimmers since freshman year, and swimming was a big deal at Yale. He was a breaststroker, and constructed like one – big strong chest, shoulders, and arms. As Lahr says, Jerry was smart – and wise; and he was truly a loyal friend. In my experience, friendship was a special thing for him – friends came first; the concerns of friends pushed everything else away. I was really busy at Yale – English major, athlete – the swimming season began in October and ended in April, and “bursary boy” – in those years scholarship students gave Yale 12 hours per week of work – and those were time-clock hours; and in my first 2 years I didn’t have many good friends. So Jerry’s friendship was really important. And it was genuine—he was really interested in me. He made time for me, he gave me generally good advice. My nickname was Flip; Jerry called me “Flipper.” He was funny. He giggled like a child at a good joke. And he was politically liberal, and he saved me from the Extreme Right, and the he he he he he Calliopean Society, into whose clutches I had nearly fallen the year before – but that’s another story. I have many stories…
Over the next 51 years we communicated sporadically – I put him on our Christmas card list, but we talked only occasionally, and we met seldom. But whenever we did, Jerry’s attitude was as if talking to me was the greatest thing that could have happened to him just then. It was exactly like that in early September, a few days before he passed, when I phoned him. Kate Answered, and advised me that he was weak… but he picked up the phone and in a strong voice, sparked by apparent delight at talking to me, he told me of his condition, and plans, and alternative plans, for his own demise. Indeed, as Will read to us earlier from Dylan Thomas, Jerry was not going to “go gentle into that good night.” My friend, I will miss you.ou.
I will read some remarks from John Lahr, who right now is in Provincetown, one stop of many on a whirlwind 2-week publisher’s tour criss-crossing the nation to talk about his new book, his biography of Tennessee Williams. John’s memories of Yale events are a bit different from mine; but about Jerry’s personal attributes, we all would concur.
. . . . .
About eighteen Christmases ago, my family and I rented a house in this picturesque town to be with Jerry who had cancer and who, it was thought, would not see out the year. The stubborn bastard has only just this month decided to leave us. Those extra nearly two decades were gravy.
Our buoyant, goofy, weirdly intimate conversation began when we were roommates at Yale; and we kept it up down the decades. A few days before he died Jerry said, ‘Johnny, don’t call again. I don’t have the energy.” Jerry without energy is impossible to imagine. He was a ball, maybe even a whirlwind, of confounding, restless energy. It was Jerry, back then, liquored up at Bennett Junior College who got all of Yale banned for a week from that paradise of pulchritude for ripping out the urinals of a local roadhouse; and Jerry who once announced himself at our Branford rooms by setting fire to the front door. And let’s not mention at this solemn occasion what happened to the legs of our living room furniture or the duck whom he insisted cohabit with us Senior year in our living room. We laughed. We laughed so hard its memory is evergreen. And that laughter, whether playing “three-wahoo” golf at Pebble Beach—yelling ‘Wahoo’ three times during the course of play—or tobogganing down a winding Vermont road at midnight—is the grace notes of joy in my life.
Jerry was, by any measurable standard known to man, eccentric. He was incorrigible, insatiable, irrepressible, smart—very smart—fierce, funny, unmoored, unabashed, human. He was also, it must be said, dangerous. It was hard to walk the streets with the guy either up here in Vermont or in Manhattan. “ “Hi ya” he’d say to people, mostly attractive women, walking along the Vermont streets, as if he were running for Mayor; that hail-fellow act didn’t play quite the same way to the wary burghers and the princesses of the Upper West Side. You sometimes had to walk behind him or even away: it was just too embarrassing. But Jerry was undaunted. He sailed through life propelled by his own whims and his own whimsy.
Of course, there was a shadow to Jerry: his compulsions and his rustication in the country broadcast anxieties he preferred the world, and maybe even himself, not to know. But he met life with courage and vigour and wonderful humour. I have a photo of us together at our 25th reunion on the mantelpiece of my office: Jerry in his bow-tie and in his prime. It’s been there for a decade; it’ll be there when they cart me off. But I don’t need the photo to remind me of his gaudy presence. I carry him, as all his beloveds do, inside me; we still have our talks. And I still call him a crazy asshole. He is still my dear, unaccountable, cherished friend.
Raymond Carver, also like Jerry struck down by cancer too early, wrote this “Late Fragment”:
And did you get what
You wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what was that?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
Beloved on the earth.
Jerry was beloved by his wonderful family and by his friends. I hope he knew it. I hope he got the life he so bravely fought for. I think he did.
God, he was a great guy.
from Jon Larson:
One of my own favorite early memories of Jerry was from back in the Fall of 1959. The coordinated water ballooning of unsuspecting classmates traversing the courtyard in Vanderbilt Hall at the far south end of the Old Campus was a huge diversionary fun break from studies. The poor unsuspecting target would take off running at the first balloon to strike and would zig-zag across the courtyard dashing for the nearest entranceway. I recall Jerry entering the courtyard as our next victim. We had a number of rooms coordinated and ready with a large supply of full balloons for a full barrage strike. But instead of dashing for cover at the first strike like all the others, Jerry did not alter his slow walking pace and he continued to saunter across the courtyard as around 20 water balloons all splashed around him onto the ground at his feet. He did not take even one direct hit. He turned around, smiled at his unseen attackers from above, opened the door and walked into the dorm bone dry. We all decided Jerry was one very cool cat under fire. I think this personality trait held up his entire life, judging from the stories about his life shared between classmates over the years.
from Bill Bell: