In Memoriam
Who Was Tim Jackson, Really? W
By Nicholas S. Thacher, Former Head of School
ho was Tim Jackson, really? The little boy pictured in 1949 as his mother lay the cornerstone of the new DCD campus? The elementary student who struggled through a challenging year in Alice Dietsch’s second-grade classroom? The young DCD graduate (Class of 1958) on whom headmaster Harry Herrick said he “took a chance” and hired to join his elementary school faculty? The jack-of-alltrades who unraveled the mysteries of mathematics for fifth graders and helped, hands-on, with every building project and campus improvement and coached ice-hockey and drove the van shuttles and accompanied rowdy eighth-grade boys as a chaperone to Washington D.C. and hosted the annual holiday parties at his home (always supplying the turkey and ham, the post-prandial cigars) and, by the way, oversaw the ongoing finances and business operations of the school for decades? We—hundreds of us, really, thousands metaphorically—bade our farewells to Tim when he retired in December of 2015. Typically, loathing the limelight, he Tim Jackson ‘58 hated every minute of it, though no doubt secretly pleased and honored. Now, a scant few years later, he is tragically, truly gone. We grieve for him, and for his sparkling wife Susie (who taught and tutored for decades at DCD herself) and their four children—Nick, Sam, Susannah, Sally— all of them DCD graduates. And, each in our own way, we think about legacy and ponder, as the greatest of the Romantic poets reminded us, “that best portion of a The whole school during Tim’s era good man’s life, his little, nameless unremembered acts of kindness and of love.” Kindness and love? I can imagine the smiles in our tightly knit DCD community. We all learned and felt the gruff side of Tim—the quintessential dog whose bark was far worse than his bite. He and his longtime assistant in the Business Office, Sgt. Peg Reed, who was his perfect complement, stewarded DCD’s relatively meagre resources carefully, sometimes fiercely. You had to prove the cost-benefit analysis if you had a proposal. Start a Horizons program? Not on your life—until Tim saw the kids, and the light, and became a ferocious protector of the flocks of economically disadvantaged children who frolicked in the swimming pools and the Lower and Middle School classrooms and gathered for lunch in the cafeteria whose funding and construction he had overseen. Need a new van? Prove it, or else—and God forbid you supported the Middle School students’ petition to have a radio in it. And yet the new van would ultimately arrive—with—grumble, grumble—the requested radio. Just be careful you don’t knock off one of the side mirrors navigating the tortuous narrow City of Boston roads—something which, to his everlasting chagrin, Tim actually did on one of his innumerable forays en route to an inner-city rink. So—the Tim Jackson Epoch has run its course at DCD, and we are left contemplating that course with wonder, affection,
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