a management position at the SD Warren Paper Company in Westbrook. By chance, Whitney reconnected with two Milton “mates,” he says, borrowed money, and with six months of operating capital, started LandVest, Inc. in 1968. LandVest is a multi-discipline real estate services company that specializes in consulting and land planning, highend real estate marketing, and forest land investment and management. The company matured into a large regional firm with a national reputation and national and international clients. Over the years the company was sold to Merrill Lynch, was bought by Prudential, and was back in its original owners’ hands by 1991.
Whitney credits Roger Fenn with teaching him the powers of observation and the value of hands-on experiences. According to Wade Staniar, one of Whitney’s first partners in the endeavor and an old friend from the YSF, Whitney was “both the founding and driving force” behind the company’s Timberland Division, “which has grown from acorn size to one of the largest private consulting firms in the country….He has been its [LandVest’s] financial and ethical conscience.” Whitney says he is proud that he helped to bring progressive forest management to the nearly one and a half million acres that are now managed by the company. “It was a good run,” he says. In retirement, Whitney reads up on junior stocks and tends his farm, fields and woodlots, which are home to Rosemary’s two horses and the family’s two dogs. He enjoys biking, canoeing, hiking, and skiing, and keeping up with friends, fostering relationships that, he has said, “have endured the tests of
Young Mike is sitting on the ground, center front, in the lightcolored jacket
time and distance.” Rosemary, who is a retired landscape architect, shares his love for conservation; while leading the local land trust in Pownal, she was instrumental in adding 500 acres to the 1500-acre state park adjacent to the family’s farm. Whitney has had a long love affair with motorcycles, sports cars, and hydroplanes, all of which he used to race. A “life list” of 115 motorcycles he once owned is down to seven and he notes in a 2010 piece for his Fenn classmates that his “chosen paths,” including his work in forestry and his racing, “often put me in harm’s way.” While on his motorcycle he hit a moose one night, emerging unscathed and upright, an outcome he attributes to “Luck, luck, and more luck, and perhaps some skill.” In a circa 2005 reflection penned for his 50th Milton reunion year, Whitney writes that it was time to “age gracefully,” and that among his aspirations are to be “kind and wise, and to be able to laugh, and to tell good stories that won’t bore people. I think I’m doing okay at all that.” We agree.
To nominate an alumnus for the Distinguished Alumnus Award contact Susan Richardson, Director of Constituent Relations, at 978-3183526 or srichardson@fenn.org