Deceased October 16, 2017

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In Memory

Ending a nearly two-year battle with a particularly virulent cancer, Bill Burt passed away peacefully on Oct. 16 in Toronto, his adopted home since graduation. With him were his second wife, Judy Thomas, and his sons Steven and Geoff.

Several months before graduation, Bill told me that he wanted no part of the Vietnam War; before the ink was dry on our diplomas, he was in Canada, where he renounced his American citizenship. Ironic that the one Goldwater conservative among my friends was the one to do this, but Bill always marched to his own drummer. Politically he was more a libertarian, with a small ‘l,’ and once with a capital L, when he ran for Parliament and garnered a respectable 1 percent of the vote.

In 1978 he quit his stockbroker job to bicycle through the Himalayas for a year. Upon returning, he set two goals: to meet a girl who shared his love of running and to be retired by age 40. He achieved the first by starting a runners club, where he met his first wife, Michelle, and the second by becoming a commodities trader and, in classic Bill Burt fashion, making a fortune by going contrary to conventional wisdom.

He bought a small farm near Lake Ontario and turned to philanthropy; in 2009 Bill established and funded the Burt Award, for novels by budding authors in developing countries, as part of a broader pro-literacy initiative. Throughout his final illness, Bill sent a series of emails to family and friends, describing, with clinical detachment, and not a trace of self-pity, how the body he always kept in superlative shape was betraying him. One such email began with a Maori proverb: “Turn your face to the sun, and the shadows fall behind you.” A perfect metaphor for a life well and fully lived. 

David L. Glass ’68