JOHN BASCOM HEATH

1923 - 2018

HEATH, John Bascom Died on Memorial Day, 28 May 2018, at the age of ninety-five in the old farmhouse in Exeter, NH that he bought in 1968. Jack was born in 1923 in Lawrenceville, NJ, the son of Mary Darwin and Harley Willis Heath, and grew up on the campus of the Lawrenceville School. Orphaned at eighteen, he graduated from Lawrenceville and Phi Beta Kappa from Yale University. He was a Sergeant in the Third Army under General Patton. After 1945 he taught English at Yale, at Phillips Exeter, and at Germantown Academy, Philadelphia, before moving definitively to Exeter in 1948 to teach at the Academy. At Phillips Exeter, he served as Lamont Professor of English, English Department Chair, Dean of Faculty, Acting Principal, varsity coach of baseball and soccer, and Commissioner of Baseball. In the summers, he ran Kamp Kill Kare, a summer camp for boys in St. Albans VT, and subsequently served as Assistant Director of the PEA Summer School and director of the Exeter Writing Project. A distinguished public servant in Exeter, Jack was once called the most respected man in town. He ran the Cub Scouts for two decades, and brought soccer to Exeter, founding the first youth soccer program and introducing the sport to the Exeter school system. He chaired innumerable town committees including the Exeter School Board, founded or helped lead local environmental organizations including the New Hampshire Farm Museum, the Exeter River Watershed Association, and the Rockingham Land Trust (now the Southeast Land Trust), and represented his town in the New Hampshire State Legislature. He wed Patricia Espy Kreutzer of Chicago in 1947, and she remained his faithful partner and companion until her death in 2014. He lost his son John in 1990. He is survived by his sons Jeffrey of Ann Arbor MI and Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso; Samuel, of Exeter, with Sandra del Alcazar and their children Aymara and Santiago; and Harley, of Wolfeboro NH, with Stacey Lessard and his children Rory and Addie. A service in Jack's memory will be offered on Sunday 28 October at 1:00 p.m. at Phillips Church, on the campus of Phillips Exeter Academy, followed by a reception in the church. You are invited to share memories of Jack in an online guest book at

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