Deceased March 26, 2016
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50th Reunion Book Entry
In Memory
Dick Farwell slipped away thankfully in his Northbrook, Ill., home on March 26. With him was son Peter (Williams ’73 and Williams’ head cross country coach since 1979).
Dick entered Amherst’s “Hurricane Class” from New Trier High School in Winnetka, Ill. Among many fond memories: being drubbed at ping pong by eventual best friend Stephen Lancaster in Delta Tau Delta’s basement; winning the English department’s annual contest for best essay—as an econ major; and wandering off one night drunk, atypically, and on foot, frat brothers later recovering him near the New Hampshire state line … , or so he maintained.
During WWII, Dick learned German for the European Theater. But when 100,000 soldiers were abruptly redeployed from officer candidacy to combat units as privates, he ended up on Guam.
Postwar, he traveled the Midwest for nine years in his father’s pioneering management consulting firm. For the next 30 years, until retirement, he was personnel director for the Portland Cement Association. During a severe downsizing, he helped hundreds of engineers and research scientists find better jobs elsewhere.
A skilled poet, he once sent a poem he’d written to his wife, “Lines from Quiet Hours: 1960–2003,” to Richard Wilbur ’42:
I would catch you
in a magic net of love,
The web so yielding
it would break
If ever you should seek escape.
Yet so enchanting
It would earn the right
to hold you to me
Free, yet tight.
Because he had mentioned tending Helen, by then paralyzed for 10 years, Wilbur responded that he too was a caregiver in his 80s and enclosed “The Reader,” a rumination on his own wife.
Both these Richards, it seems, cherished connections nurtured by the College. Shortly before pneumonia took him, my father began whispering to his daughter-in-law and grandson, “Old Amherst’s Out For Business…” Having heard him sing it often, they joined in.
Steve Farwell ’71
