Deceased May 21, 2022
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In Memory
Colin Dickson died May 21, 2022, at a retirement home in Fort Collins, Colorado, from complications of dementia. He was 84 and held two graduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania: an MS in physics and a PhD in romance languages.
Janice (Lind), his wife of 56 years, explains that while working at the Frankford Arsenal, Colin felt “there was no lyricism, no humanity in physics, so he went back to Penn to study romance languages.” By then, he had met and married Janice.
They had met the old-fashioned way, “at a party in Philadelphia, making eye contact across a crowded room” she recalled in a telephone conversation. She then found out his route home from Penn and arranged to walk her dog near his bus stop. “I stalked him,” she said.
Colin spent more than 30 years as a professor of French at Washington College, in Chestertown, on the eastern shore of Maryland, until his retirement in 2003.
He and Janice moved to Fort Collins in 2014 to be near their daughter Erica (Keith Hupperts) and their two grandchildren.
Colin was an avid fly fisherman, a modern-day hunter-gatherer who filled the family freezer with venison and collected edible weeds (not THAT kind!), and a skilled mycologist who foraged for mushrooms. He was also a jazz enthusiast and completely self-taught pianist who formed a trio that played gigs in local bars and for weddings and funerals.
Our classmate Jackson Bryer ’59 recalls running into the Dicksons at a Kennedy Center opera performance and bonding over their shared love of music, especially opera.
“Once, when we were at the Kennedy Center, Colin sat down at an untended piano in a deserted room and played beautifully. He was a gentle, kind, talented, unpretentious soul,” Jack recalls, “whose company I enjoyed very much.”
Claude Erbsen ’59