Deceased June 19, 2014
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In Memory
Ken Phelon passed away on June 19, 2014, of kidney and lung problems.
After Amherst and a publishing career, he and wife Mary retired to Sun City, Arizona, in 1997 to be closer to daughter Monica and her three children in Phoenix and psychiatric social worker daughter Hope and her three horses in Wyoming.
There he continued his activities in the Catholic Church as a lector, abstract painting, lover of jazz music, poetry writer and authority on Pulitzer poet Richard Wilbur '42, and low handicap golfer. I played with him often during my Arizona winters, highlighted by post-game picking of lemons and grapefruits from his backyard trees.
Wife Mary and son Ken predeceased him. On Ken's passing, his daughters offered his putter to a golf partner named Kurt Hofmann, retired VP of University of Maine who accepted it saying, "I do so not because it will be used but because with it I still golf with Ken, it keeps me near a dear friend who represents the best of a liberal arts education--an intellectual but not arrogant, a man of abiding faith but tolerant of other paths, a man of limited means but unlimited generosity, a man for whom lifelong learning was not a platitude but a daily practice, and a graduate who held his alma mater in high esteem. If it still produces liberal arts graduates in the Ken Phelon mold, it is about what it should be about." Terras Irradient.
Ed Rowen '50