Richard Douglas Stephenson, of Lafayette Hill, Pennsylvania, died on October 18, 2024. He was 93.
The son of the late Elizabeth Eleanor Orr and Frank Beswick Stephenson, both of Philadelphia.
Dick was born in New York City, New York, where he lived until he finished sixth grade and the family moved to a small farm near Doylestown. He attended Buckingham Friends School and George School, both of which had a strong influence on his beliefs and values.
In 1949 he entered Brown University, but did not do well and dropped out after three semesters to join the Army. He served three years, half in Korea, where he was assigned to the United Nations Command Military Armistice Commission. After working for one of the assistant secretaries of state helping negotiate the armistice, he was a member of one of the teams that patrolled the Demilitarized Zone following the cease-fire. Dick was always proud that he had enlisted and had not been drafted. After his discharge, he returned to Brown and in 1957 graduated with distinction in English Literature. After several failed attempts to follow his father in an advertising career, Dick took a job in college admissions at the University of Pittsburgh, that led to a twenty year career in which he had considerable success in managing especially difficult admissions situation such as the admission of men to Vassar and the merger of Western Reserve University with Case Institute of Technology.
In 1978 he moved to St. Lawrence University for the first assignment in what became a second twenty year career in the development of endowment funds for a variety of col1eges and universities. He retired from Bowdoin College in 1996.
Dick’s first wife, Sandy Murray, whom he met in college and married in 1958, died after they had shared forty-two years together. With the help of a mutual friend, he then eventually was able to reestablish an old association with Ann Radcliff Wells, whom he had once cared for but had not seen since leaving home for the Army fifty years earlier and they were married in 2002. Following a valiant year-long battle with cancer, Ann died in 2019. At just under eighteen years, theirs was a relatively short but uncommonly rich marriage in which each of their lives were illuminated by the interests of the other, Dick’s by Ann’s love of opera, Ann’s by Dick’s involvement with chamber music. Ann’s commitment, to the careers of the young singers she knew took them to many places new to Dick: Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, Copenhagen and Capetown. In turn, Ann came to share Dick’s deep affection for Maine, where they spent almost half of most years eagerly exploring its endlessly intriguing mountains, lakes and coastline.
Dick is survived by all of Ann’s family, including her two daughters, Mary Wells Ogden, her husband Henry and Lee Wells, who cared lovingly for him after Ann’s death and whom he loved as if they were his own, as well as Ann’s five grandchildren.
Services and interment will be private.