Deceased December 14, 2007
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25th Reunion Book Entry
In Memory
It is with great sadness that I report the death of our classmate and my lifelong friend, Alanson Willcox, on Dec. 14, 2007, after a year’s struggle with cancer.
Born in Washington, D.C., Lance was the elder son of Alanson Work Willcox and Marjorie Champion Willcox. When we were applying to Amherst, Lance’s grandfather, Walter Francis Willcox ’84, a distinguished professor of statistics and economics at Cornell, was Amherst’s oldest living alumnus. Lance’s father was general counsel of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations; his mother was an attorney at HEW and the Indian Health Service.
Lance attended Sidwell Friends School in Washington, excelling academically and playing football, soccer and tennis. He took pride in having attended “Transition,” a Friends innovation that provided a year of school between kindergarten and first grade for those needing additional time to “mature,” and he considered himself a shining example of the program’s wisdom.
His straight-as-an-arrow scholar-athlete trajectory carried through Amherst. A cum laude graduate in economics, he won the prize for the best economics thesis. A member of Phi Delta Sigma, he co-captained the varsity soccer team with Rob Sherman and in senior year was all-New England. He also played lacrosse, but his favorite sports were informal, fiercely competitive variants on football: touch, or snow football (slow-motion tackle, heavy coats for equipment), or crawl tackle (a bruising game on hands and knees on any carpeted surface).
Lance loved the cold. As kids, we’d skied and skated—once, without adult supervision, crossing a frozen Potomac above Little Falls. As my freshman roommate in Stearns, Lance insisted on keeping both windows wide open all winter. It was no surprise to wake up and look across at Lance sleeping under a 2-inch blanket of snow.
After Amherst Lance served two years in the Peace Corps on a forestry project in Chile. He was there during the tumultuous transition from Allende to Pinochet and came home not a little traumatized. After another “transition,” Lance settled in San Francisco and earned his Ph.D. from the California School of Professional Psychology. From 1974 on, he worked in mental health in the Bay Area.
An avid sailor, Lance loved to get out with friends on San Francisco Bay and hosted nautical adventures in Maine, Scotland, Baja, the British Virgin Islands and Greece. Adventure was the key: sailing with Lance could be counted on to push the limit and narrowly avert some disaster. He also bicycled and continued to play football and tennis.
Lance had an extremely kind and generous spirit (one classmate said he never knew Lance to get mad) and was a devoted friend, with a voluminous capacity to empathize and a quality of giving the distinct impression he’d been thinking about something you’d find interesting during the weeks or months you hadn’t seen him. He had an intellect of the first order, focused at Amherst by Leo Marx and, later, by conversation, extensive reading, listening to NPR and watching every episode of Seinfeld.
During his final illness—which accelerated over the last year, claiming his life well before anyone expected—friends did much for Lance, but his company did more for them. Forever curious, he could take the book you’d read or the encounter you’d had and turn it into a fascinating exploration of fact, motive and cause. He retained his sense of irony and humor to his last days, engendering tremendous loyalty and affection among his nursing staff.
Gordon Radley, Lance’s brother Dana and I were with him in his final hours, and Jack Widness and Kermit Smyth were crucial supporters from a distance, as were Peace Corps and San Francisco friends. His departure leaves a void in the hearts of all who knew him. He is survived by Dana, of Silver Spring, Md., and a nephew, Alanson Willcox. A service to commemorate Lance’s life was held in San Francisco in early February 2008.
Chris Brown ’68
