In Memory

Jim Atwood died peacefully on October 20, 1998 at
Wilder Residence East in St. Paul, MN, after a long
period of ill health.
Jim was born July 4, 1938 in Minneapolis to
George Winthrop Atwood and Katherine May Atwood
(Clark). He received his secondary education at the
Blake School in Minneapolis, from which he graduated
with distinction. Jim went on to Amherst along with
two other Blake School students, Lynn Truesdell and
Peter Van Dusen.
At Amherst, Jim majored in history and was active
in the blood drives, the College Sixteen, and the
Outing Club. He was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon
fraternity, of which he was secretary during his senior
year.
Jim had a great love of music and was a talented
jazz pianist. Fraternity brother Art Powell reminisces
that Jim’s presence at the piano of the Deke House on
a Saturday night, with cigarette dangling from his
mouth, would conjure up images of Hoagy Carmichael
and that it took only a little stretch of the imagination
for one to think that he was in one of the country’s
great jazz establishments.
Peter Van Dusen recalls that Jim was brilliant,
funny, and witty. He remembers how Jim would put his
humor and wit to good use for Amherst by coming
down to the home hockey games and heckling the
players on the visiting team. Jim’s heckling was so
uproarious that its unnerving effect on the opposite
team was as good as having an extra man on the
Amherst team.
Jim returned to his native Minneapolis after
graduation, and over the course of the years worked
for Donaldson’s, the Courier Dispatch, Inc., and the
Handicapped Transport System. Unfortunately, as time
passed Jim because incapacitated by poor health, and
he spent the final years of his life at Wilder Residence
East.
Lynn Truesdell, a lifelong friend of Jim’s, wrote the
following for the local newspapers. “All who knew Jim
will remember particularly his keen wit, his sense of
humor, and his great talent as a jazz pianist, all of
which were so much a part of him, and so
characterized his life during his vital years.”
Jim never married. He is survived by his mother;
by his brothers, John, Christopher, and Clark; by his
sister Kate; and by three nephews and one niece, to
all of whom the Class extends its sympathy.

- John E.G. Bischof ’58