In Memoriam

Soon after Katharine “Kathy” Tarbox met Donald “Ossie” McLeod, she was struck by his love of New Hampshire and his loyalty to UNH, where he had played football and lacrosse and was president of his class. They married in 1983 and went to the first of many UNH Reunions that year. “I met many of his lifelong friends,” Kathy says. “He loved the school and felt it had made him the man he was.” He was known to many as “Mr. UNH.”

A dedicated fundraiser for the university, Ossie liked to say, “If you put UNH on your resume, you should be making a sizable contribution to the school.” He showed his loyalty to his alma mater in many ways, including nine years as director of the UNH Foundation Board and providing financial support to athletic and academic programs.

In October 2021, he was honored as “Donor of the Game” during a football game with Dartmouth at Wildcat Stadium. Accepting his award, McLeod said, “I loved my time at this university, and getting to come back each year, it makes all the difference — I’ve been very fortunate in life, and having the opportunity to give back to a place filled with so many memories, and a place I believe in, it’s been wonderful … I just love it here!”

In his memory, the Donald “Ossie” McLeod ’58 Athletic Football Program Endowment Fund was established last fall through the UNH Foundation.

His career would be spent in advertising and sales, first at E.J. DuPont Co., which would transfer him to Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Connecticut. He left DuPont in the late 1970s to develop distributorships selling packaging systems. He retired in 2000 from the last of the companies he had founded, McLeod & Dewey Associates in Agawam, Massachusetts.

McLeod grew up hunting and fishing, activities he pursued throughout his life, along with boating and canoeing. He enjoyed his vacation home in Moultonborough on Lake Winnipesaukee; in retirement, he and Kathy made it their permanent home, often entertaining friends and their large extended family. For many years, he was a trustee of the Lakes Region Conservation Trust and helped raise funds to purchase Castle in the Clouds in Moultonborough and establish the Castle Preservation Trust to operate and preserve the historic 1914 building and expansive grounds.

The couple traveled extensively, making their first trip to Scotland in 1984 where Ossie enjoyed learning more about the history of his family name. He made new friends wherever he went. “People were a strong interest, and he let everyone know that he cared and was glad to know them,” says Kathy.

From 2000 on, the couple spent winters in Hawaii, where McLeod loved golf and paddling in Hawaiian six-man canoes. “He enjoyed being the oldest paddler in the Waikoloa Canoe Club, easily keeping up although the next oldest paddler was eight or 10 years younger,” says Kathy.

McLeod had five children with his first wife, including daughters Donna Balsan, Deborah McLeod, Diane Louis and sons Donald and Daniel ’82. He delighted in his family, which grew to include 10 grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren, greeting the eleventh just two weeks before his death on September 9, 2023.

In 2020, Ossie and Kathy’s move to a retirement community in Durham meant he could easily attend sporting events, and they both enjoyed using the pool and participating in community activities. For “Mr. UNH,” Durham could not have been a more perfect location.

In retirement, Edwinna Creswick Vanderzanden and Andre, her pediatrician husband of 59 years, enjoyed trips to Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard with their daughters, Danielle Vanderzanden and Jacqueline Vanderzanden Roland. Edwinna liked to say that salt water could heal you, “no matter what was wrong with you, physically or mentally,” says Danielle.

Time to relax by the sea came after a long and busy career. After graduating magna cum laude from Hackensack Hospital School of Nursing, Edwinna worked at a neighborhood health clinic in Roxbury, Massachusetts, while training as a pediatric nurse practitioner at Northeastern University. She moved to New Hampshire to help establish a county maternal and infant care clinic, and earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing from UNH. She also pursued a lifelong interest in law by earning a juris doctor degree from the University of Maine School of Law in 1984.

For almost two decades, Vanderzanden focused on professional negligence defense and employment law. She utilized her training in both law and medicine by lecturing at UNH, where she taught courses in legal issues affecting nursing professionals.

She was a dedicated member of the UNH Alumni Association Board, including two years as president, expanding the board to include representatives from UNH Manchester, the Parents’ Association and UNH Graduate School. Appointed to the USNH Board of Trustees in 2005, she served for several years, including two years as the board secretary. She received the UNH Alumni Meritorious Service Award in acknowledgment of all she helped to accomplish.

An indefatigable volunteer, Vanderzanden was director of the New Hampshire Foundation for Medical Care from 1984 to 1994, and on the boards of three visiting nurse associations and local music and conservation groups. Politically active, she housed volunteers who came to New Hampshire to work for her favorite Democratic candidates.

Edwinna and Andre owned a large farm near Peter Lamb ’76, who served with her on the UNH Alumni Association board and the USNH Board of Trustees and came to know the couple well. “Edwinna was a tireless advocate for students and always had some useful connection to further UNH and USNH’s partnerships and mission in the region,” says Lamb. “She had one of the sharpest minds in the room.”

Edwinna was devoted to Andre and their family, which grew to include several grandchildren on whom they doted. As an animal lover, she raised collies and sheep in addition to the horses on the farm where the family made so many happy memories. She hosted a big New Year’s Eve party every year for decades, and friends and family knew her as someone who was always willing to help others solve their problems.

“I was always amazed at how she could juggle raising wonderful kids, a loving marriage with Andre, an extensive professional career, and maintaining a working farm, not to mention frequent travel adventures and numerous volunteer roles,” says Lamb.

She accomplished so much by “always going 100 miles an hour,” says daughter Danielle, adding that while going in so many directions might be exhausting for the average person, her mother was as energetic as anyone could be. “She was a model for doing it all. It was sometimes overwhelming for the rest of us, but not her.”

Following Vanderzanden’s death on December 5, 2023, her friend Peter Lamb spoke for many who benefited from her knowledge and spirit, saying, “I know that our community is a better place because of Edwinna’s many contributions through decades of service.”

A true son of New Hampshire, Jack Weeks was born in Laconia and died there on December 7, 2023, his 91st birthday. Jack grew up on Weeks Dairy Farm, the son of founder John Weeks.

Jack succeeded his father as the company president in 1969. The dairy expanded into a string of successful restaurants and, through a series of acquisitions, became a leading New Hampshire company. Following a merger with Concord Dairy in 1970, the milk processing business relocated to Concord and was later acquired by Crowley Foods (now H.P. Hood). Jack retired in 1989.

It was while working in the dairy’s bottling plant that he met his future wife, Pat Foley Weeks. They were together for 65 years, raising sons John and Michael and daughters Jane and Sheryl and delighting in their three grandsons.

At their father’s funeral, children Jane and John shared stories of their father’s long life and the lessons he taught by example. Jane remembered that the move to Concord gave her father more leisure time; he enjoyed jogging until arthritis set in, then took up swimming and skiing and biking, considering downhill trails a challenge to go as fast as he could. Retirement gave him time for traveling with Pat and enjoying their vacation homes on Lake Winnisquam and Marco Island.

In 2003, after he expressed envy at Jane’s hiking and biking adventures, she invited her father to accompany her on a biking trip in Portugal. Together they covered 40 to 50 miles a day, mostly through farmland where Jack would “moo” and “neigh” at the animals — still a farm boy at heart, he loved the bucolic setting, says Jane. Other father-daughter adventures followed, including biking and hiking in South Africa.

In his eulogy, son John shared a long-ago memory of joining his father on a two-mile run despite never having run that far in his life. The younger Weeks quickly found himself gasping for breath. But there was no lecture about not being properly prepared; instead, Jack helped his son find a pace they could continue together.

It’s a memory that was a metaphor for much of their relationship in his youth, recalled John. “I’d go rushing off in a direction that didn’t always make sense, but he always showed patience, understanding and support when needed, helping me to figure things out and eventually come back to him in a much better place as a person.”

Throughout his long life, Weeks retained his love for New Hampshire (he served three terms in the New Hampshire House of Representatives as the Republican representative from Concord), as well as his affection for UNH. He was a member of the founding board of the UNH Foundation and served in the UNH Alumni Association and then as alumni trustee on the USNH Board of Trustees. He was honored with the Alumni Meritorious Award, the UNH Profile of Service Award and the UNH Center for Family Enterprise Lifetime Achievement Award. With Pat, he was a generous supporter of the College of Life Sciences and Agriculture.

Weeks barely slowed down as he grew older, continuing travels that included a memorable trip to New Zealand where he bungee-jumped from a bridge outside Queenstown. When friends asked why he would take such a risk, Jack, ever the frugal Yankee, replied, “Because it was free for people 65 and over.”

In a eulogy following Kris Durmer’s death on December 9, 2023, daughter Ashley recalled her father’s belief that communication was one of life’s most important skills. From their elementary school days until they left for college, Ashley and her siblings, Karis and Taylor, were taught by their dad how to articulate their views and opinions. While reading their school papers, he wielded what his children called the “infamous red pen” to edit their drafts and show them how to improve their writing.

“I’m not sure which one of us holds the record for most drafts,” Ashley told those gathered at Kris’s funeral, “but I do know I got well into the double digits on my seventh grade Seven Wonders of the World report.”

When he realized his life was coming to an end, Kris encouraged Ashley to write his eulogy, secure in the knowledge that he had taught her well and he could confidently lay down his red pen.

Organizing every detail of his own funeral was typical of Kris, says his wife, Lynda, remembering him as “the ultimate planner.” Before a five-week family trip through Europe in the 1990s, Kris meticulously plotted every detail, she says. Ashley adds, “There was always a plan, an itinerary and, yes, a hard-copy pocket map.”

After graduating from UNH in 1971, where he played varsity soccer, and from UNH Law in 1978, Kris entered private practice in 1979 and was later admitted to practice before the District Court for the District of New Hampshire, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 2009, he was appointed General Counsel for the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), managing GSA’s Office of General Counsel with branches in Washington, D.C., and 11 federal regions across the country. He oversaw the agency’s legal affairs and advised officials on the agency’s diverse missions.

“Relocating to Washington, D.C., to head up the legal office of the GSA under President Obama was a highlight of his life,” says Lynda. “According to those who have been at the GSA legal office for years, Kris was the longest-serving general counsel ever and the most respected.” Former Presidents Obama and Clinton both reached out to Kris in his final illness to thank him for his service.

Despite working long hours at his profession, he enjoyed a well-rounded life. He served in the National Guard and as a volunteer firefighter, coached youth sports, cheered on the Patriots and loved sunsets and lobster dinners. Always proud of his UNH background, he served on the Alumni Association Board of Directors from 2014-2020.

“Above all, it was family,” says daughter Ashley. In recent years, that love extended to his four grandchildren who, in his words, made his heart “feel good and full.”

Ashley says her father taught his children how to ride a bike, drive a stick shift and enjoy the music of Bob Dylan, the Beatles and Bruce Springsteen, whom he considered the great poets of their time. He also listened intently when his children introduced him to boy bands. And he always ended conversations with his children with “Oh … and I love you very much.”

When Ashley moved south to work on a political campaign, Kris sensed that she was overwhelmed and offered to help. Despite decades of high-level political experience, he went door-to-door and stayed up all night waiting for the election results. Although her candidate’s loss devastated Ashley, her father reminded her that she would be OK, adding, as always, “Oh … and I love you very much.”

During the Blizzard of ’78, the Huntington family was in a race against time. As owners of Pleasant View Gardens, a wholesale nursery in Loudon, they watched and worried as the classic Nor’easter battered a greenhouse full of cyclamen, a perennial popular with their customers.

So, parents Jon and Eleanor, sons Jeffrey and Henry, and a couple of their growers went to work, braving the hurricane-force winds and blinding snow to move the greenhouse contents of plants to a sturdier structure.

The plants — and the Huntingtons — survived and had a harrowing tale of racing against the elements to share for years afterward.

That work ethic — everyone pitching in to do what needs to be done — is how Jon and Eleanor built a small nursery into the largest wholesale plant business in New Hampshire and one of the largest in New England. The business would grow further through a partnership in 1992 that launched Proven Winners, the biggest brand in the nursery industry, with everything from petunias to sweet potato vine found on shelves of practically any big-box retailer and garden center nationwide.

Jon, whose determination led his family to success and who balanced that achievement with love of family and a strong sense of faith, passed away on December 8, 2023.

At UNH he was a dairy science major in the class of 1950 before he was drafted for the Korean War and served as a mess sergeant during the German occupation, where he attended cooking school — making cooking one of his favorite avocations for the rest of his life. “He and my mom used to put on church suppers, which started as spaghetti suppers, and then became these big barbecues … they’d cook for 500 people or so,” son Jeffrey remembers.

In 1954 he would marry Eleanor Rippe, and often worked with her father at the Rippe family’s farm in Westport, Connecticut. Eventually he took it over, before the family (including three children: Jeffrey ’76, Henry ’80 and Anne) decided to move to New Hampshire in 1976, purchasing Pleasant View. Jon had a plan for expansion: He would model it after a roadside market he once ran in Connecticut, which he stocked “with stuff no one else had” and grew his customer base through quality and novelty of product. He thought the same could be done with foliage plants, which eventually gave way to flowering ones, and success continued.

In 2014, the family launched lef Farms in Loudon, a large-scale indoor robotic farming facility. The family sold the business to the national business BrightFarms in 2021.

But it wasn’t all work and no play. Jeffrey says his father was heavily involved in their lives as they grew up. And when he started working seven days a week at the farm, the kids would tag along.

“The lessons he taught me were, of course, his work ethic, but also not to take yourself too seriously,” says Jeffrey of his father’s sense of humor. “He always had the devil in him, that would be a good way to put it.”

Huntington led his family by example when it came to his alma mater, staying involved and supporting UNH students through the Eleanor Rippe Huntington Nursing Scholarship (in honor of his wife Eleanor, who passed away in 2017) and the Huntington Family Scholarship for students in the College of Life Sciences and Agriculture. Both Jeffrey and Henry are members of the COLSA Development Board.

Huntington relished in good times with lots of laughter, Jeffrey says, recalling one of his favorite pictures of his dad. “We’re at Henry’s lake house last Labor Day, and it’s a group of three relatives including my dad just sitting there talking and laughing — someone looked at that picture recently and said they could hear my father’s laughter when they look at it. That was just so him.”

“Few in New Hampshire or elsewhere knew his story.” That’s how the Union Leader newspaper describes the life and times of Roland Lajoie ’58, the UNH graduate who would go on to be a key figure in one of America’s most dangerous and complicated eras — the height of the Cold War, when tensions between Russia and the U.S. were at an all-time high.

Lajoie, who entered the Army and served two tours in Vietnam, would serve his country in many military and government roles, most notably as the lead architect of the dismantling of nuclear weapons in Soviet areas. Under the auspices of the Soviet Nuclear Threat Reduction Act, he led hundreds of technicians and officers to Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and other countries to help dismantle weapons, secure their warheads and, in many cases, convert the nuclear cores to civilian reactor fuel, according to his obituary in the New York Times.

“This guy served us at the most difficult time in the history of this country,” says fraternity brother and fellow UNH alum State Sen.

Lou D’Allesandro ’61, D-Manchester. “When the Soviets were there, when they had 20,000 nuclear bombs, we had 30,000 nuclear bombs. The world was in chaos. One slip could have caused a world conflict.

“Rolie Lajoie, a kid from Nashua, New Hampshire, who went to the University of New Hampshire, was in the ROTC program, was responsible for saving us. A truly, truly great American.”

That unsung hero, Maj. Gen. Roland Lajoie ’58, died on October 28, 2023, in Manchester from complications of heart surgery, according to his family. He was 87. He leaves wife Jo Ann; children Michelle Detwiler, Chris Lajoie and Renee Lajoie Newell; four grandchildren; his sister and extended family.

The Times called Lajoie “part officer, part diplomat, part spy … on the front lines of the Cold War.”

As D’Allesandro says, it was a fascinating journey. He was born in 1936 in New Hampshire to French-Canadian parents, one of eight children. Those siblings would pool their money to send him to UNH, where he earned a degree in government and immediately enrolled in the Army.

After Vietnam, he was a military attaché in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and later chief military liaison in Potsdam, East Germany. An expert on Soviet military capabilities and doctrine, in 1985, he helped diffuse a tense Cold War situation when a Russian sentry shot and killed an unarmed American officer, Major Arthur Nicholson Jr., while on a routine mission. Lajoie was Nicholson’s commanding officer and managed the unfolding crisis, protesting the unwarranted killing of the unarmed American, keeping the incident from spiraling out of control.

He was selected by the Reagan Administration in 1987 to design a groundbreaking organization to ensure Soviet compliance with the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. He created the On-Site Inspection Agency (OSIA) and served as its first director. In 1992, he was selected by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Colin Powell, to establish and lead a new Office of Military Affairs in the CIA. He retired from the Army in 1994, and then served as the deputy assistant to the Secretary of Defense for cooperative threat reduction, assisting in the decommissioning and securing of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons stockpiles in the former Soviet states.

D’Allesandro, who was also a UNH lacrosse teammate of Lajoie’s, says Lajoie’s career is nothing short of unbelievable — with a global impact.

“This would be a great movie, the Lajoie story,” D’Allesandro says. “In his career and even as a student at UNH, all his life, he was just a very fine guy.”