Alice Davidson Outwater

1929 - 2018

Alice Davidson Outwater

- - Alice Davidson Outwater, passed away on November 1st, at her home in South Burlington, two days before her 89th birthday. She passed peacefully with her children holding her hands. She was born in 1929, the fifth of six children born to Alice Hooker and Sidney Wetmore Davidson in Brooklyn Heights, New York. She attended Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn Heights for her primary and secondary education. The family spent summers at their camp, Graylane, on Sebec Lake in central Maine.

IN 1947, at the age of 17, Alice traveled to France with the Experiment in International Living on the S.S. Marine Tiger, a converted troop ship from WWII. She spent the summer as a counselor in southern France at a camp for boys whose fathers had been killed. Their assignment was to bring them back to health. The next year, she spent a summer hiking in Swedish Lapland and leading a climbing group near Annecy, France.

She graduated from Packer Collegiate Institute and then Vassar College. Later she received her M.A. from the University of Vermont and finally, at the age of sixty, her Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from Union Institute.

After Vassar, she worked for over a year at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C. While there, she met and married a dashing mechanical engineer, Dr. John O. Outwater, Jr., a Cambridge University graduate with many interests. He had been brought up in wartime England and served in the British Indian Army. During most of their life together, he was a professor and conducted research with UVM in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Alice and John lived on Overlake Park, in Burlington, Vermont for nearly fifty years, and they summered on Thompson's Point, Charlotte, Vt.

Alice got her M.A. after raising their four children, and joined the Counseling and Testing Center at UVM; after she earned her PhD, she opened her own practice specializing in marriage and family counseling. She taught nurses up and down the state before the era of the internet, as well as at the Plattsburg Air Force base. Any new experience interested her.

Community involvement was important to both John and Alice. They helped start Overlake Day School, and were instrumental in starting the Mozart Festival whose concerts continued for 35 years, often attended by 2,000 on the lawn of Shelburne Farms. Through the decades, they hosted many receptions at their gracious home.

She was a member of the Chilton Club in Boston. She was active to the end in her beloved Vassar College where she served on class committees, valued her classmates, and kept in touch with a wide array of them. Her recent energies were spent at the Shelburne Museum and the Inn at Shelburne Farms with their many extraordinary programs.

She wrote two books: 82 Remsen Street, growing up in Brooklyn Heights and Remsen Street Revisited (published by Wind Ridge Publishers, in Shelburne), depicting her early life in a large double brownstone with live-in help. She also wrote a monthly column called Taking Care for the Charlotte News, on aging, to encourage elders to get out, find new interests and keep trekking. Her enthusiasm and interest in other people's stories fascinated her. She especially enjoyed encouraging, starting and helping new enterprises. Her aging energies could not encompass all she wished to do.

She felt immense gratitude for her educational opportunities, worldwide travel, a beloved husband and supportive children and friends. Her children and grandchildren living all over the world kept in close touch with her, leading interesting lives themselves, constantly amazed her.

She loved living during this remarkable time in history, and given good health would have liked to have hung around much longer.

She was predeceased by her husband Professor John Ogden Outwater, Jr., her parents, and four of her six siblings. She has left behind her sister Louise Davidson Heynemann and brother in law Prof. Donald Heynemann. She has left four children, Anne Hooker Outwater of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Catherine Boe Colby of West Covina, California; Alice Brookfield Outwater and her husband Robert Brennan Lang of Ignacio, Colorado; and John Ogden Outwater and his wife Eileen Zhang Outwater of Boston Massachusetts. She has left three grandchildren: Samuel Outwater Lang, Arthur Boe Colby, and John Jacob Outwater, as well as beloved nieces and nephews.

There will be a Memorial Service at 3 PM on Saturday, 17 November at All Souls Interfaith Center in Shelburne. Anybody who would like to make a memorial contribution may consider supporting the Vermont Center for Ecostudies (P.O. Box 420, Norwich, VT 05055; https://vtecostudies.org/give/) or her Rejuvenation Fund which has been reviving the ecosystem of coastal East Africa (P.O. Box 105211, Msasani, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; ).