Mr. Terry Collison

Terry Collison died Wednesday, March 30 after living strong with cancer for almost two years. He was 69. Born in 1942 in Wilmington, Terry attended Harlan, P.S. du Pont, and Tower Hill. He graduated from Williams College (cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) and attended the University of Pennsylvania where he earned his Master’s in Urban Planning and an advanced certificate in Civic Design. In 1967, GE invited Terry to California to be part of an internal venture team. He was subsequently recruited to MTI, a GE engineering spin-off in Latham, NY. He next had the opportunity to be one of six co-founders of the School of Architecture and Environmental Design created on the Buffalo campus of the State University of New York. Beginning in the 1980s, Terry became focused on promising young companies, entrepreneurs, and company teams. He served as Board member and President of the Entrepreneurs Forum of Greater Philadelphia, he was on the Board of the Greater Philadelphia Group (and chaired its Venture Institute), he co-founded the Delaware Entrepreneurs Forum and its annual Venture Fair and the Delaware Innovation Fund. In 1995, he and a partner co-founded Blue Rock Capital, a fund to make first-round investments in young technology companies. Terry’s passion was music – hearing it, playing it, thinking about it, and supporting it. With his two sons and six other friends, Terry played bari in a horn-fronted nine-piece Wilmington funk band called Soul City. In the last several years, Terry also wrote light verse in the Ogden Nash vein, first stimulated by the opportunity to read pieces in his grandsons’ Library periods. Clients, CEOs, friends, and family members often received one of these verses in response to some off-hand comment or an event in the news. Terry was married to the former Helen Watson for almost 46 years; they have two sons, Blaine and Chandler, and three grandsons, Ellis, Holden and Calvin. Terry is the son of Catherine Paul Collison of Wilmington and has two sisters Eugenie duPont and Wendy Leslie and a host of in-laws, nieces and nephews. Terry treasured his family and the many friends who enriched his life. Services will be private. Contributions in Terry’s memory can be made to Market Street Music, 1101 Market Street, Wilmington, DE 19801.