In memoriam: John Reeves
May 19, 1934–January 12, 2023
John Reeves, photo credit COA archives.
By Ron Beard
John Reeves was a trustee at College of the Atlantic from the early 1990s, and was designated as a COA Life Trustee in the late 2000s. One of John’s attributes was that he was a banker and, in those early years, with budgets often perilously tight, bankers were good allies to have. We often saw John asking quiet but perceptive questions about the whys and wherefores of finance, and whether it was really wise to acquire property to expand the footprint of the college (in time, he saw that it was).
But John was more than that. Here is how his friend and Bar Harbor Bank and Trust colleague Sheldon Goldthwait saw him: “John was always upbeat, with a smile on his face, except when the pool was closed, or the water was too cold to swim. Along with the smile, he had a cheerful swagger that would have suited a cowboy. Though he was a non-smoker, I could picture a pack of cigarettes rolled up in his T-shirt sleeve, to go with his rolled up Levis.”
I remember John at the swimming pool, a 1970s addition to the 1893 YMCA building that now houses the Abbe Museum. I admired his steady, strong strokes. We used to schedule our lap time to avoid the chaos of swim team practice under the boisterous direction of Y director Lenny Demuro. And John and I used to argue about who was the last in the pool before its roof collapsed under the wet weight of a late winter snowstorm in 1993.
At the time, we were both on the board of the YMCA, and were called to lead the capital campaign for the new Y on Park Street. It was a long campaign. John’s contacts and forthright manner led eventually to its successful completion in 1997, raising $3.5 million with leadership from local people and businesses.
(On Park Street, the Y got a new building and a new pool, and College of the Atlantic got the shell of the former Acadia National Park headquarters which is now the Natural History Museum, but that’s another story.)
John and his wife Gail had moved their young family to Mount Desert Island in 1963. A close reading of his obituary reveals his civic and family values: serving on the Bar Harbor Town Council, on the boards of the Jackson Laboratory and the Chamber of Commerce, and as a member of the fire and ambulance squads for the town. He played guitar, favoring the tunes of Elvis and Johnny Cash. He treasured his time at the family camp on Lower Lead Mountain Pond and annual fishing trips to Chamberlain Lake.
Fellow board member Bill Foulke recalled John’s service on the board, calling him a true “servant-leader,” modest but capable, willing to take on whatever was asked of him. Another fellow board member, Sam Hamill, remembered John as the picture of stability and community presence that COA needed in its first quarter century.
In some ways, John’s view of the college was in the spirit of founding trustee Les Brewer—seeing the potential of a thriving college as part of the economic engine of Mount Desert Island. He was always proud of his connection to the college and of its contribution to the community he called home.
