Jerome Doolittle

WEST CORNWALL - Jerry Doolittle, a writer and unusually well-informed amateur herpetologist who helped to resettle several Vietnamese and Lao families in the Northwest Corner of Connecticut in the 1970's, died on November 19, 2023, at the age of 90 in Salisbury, CT of complications of sepsis.

The 51-year resident of West Cornwall, CT was well-known for his scathing wit. For instance, Elizabeth Kolbert of The New Yorker in 2004 wrote: "Jerome Doolittle, a White House speechwriter who sometimes composed funny lines for Carter, likened his role to that of Franklin Roosevelt's tap-dance coach."

?He was born in Pittsburgh in 1933 to a socially prominent family. His father, the late William M. Doolittle, relocated the family to the Northwest Corner to assume the headmastership of Indian Mountain School in the late 1930's. His mother, Mary ("Sue") Hill Doolittle, struggled with alcoholism and addiction, and when Jerry's father volunteered for service in World War II, Jerry and his siblings were left largely to their own devices on the campus of Indian Mountain School. The fields, woods, hills and ponds of Indian Mountain were where Jerry spent hours alone, often reading books from the school library, and where he developed his lifelong love of nature, especially snakes. He became an expert downhill skier on Indian Mountain's old rope tow runs, a skill which served him well during his years at Middlebury College, where he was a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. He was graduated from Middlebury in 1954, and remained an active skier into his 70's.

?Jerry in his youth traveled widely within the U.S., holding a number of blue-collar jobs including oil field roustabout. Upon graduation from college, he was drafted into the U.S. Army, where he served at military bases in the U.S. His experience as an enlisted man instilled in him a life-long skepticism of authority figures in general, and commissioned military officers in particular.

?Also, during his military service in 1956, he was married to Gretchen Dewitt Rath, a Middlebury classmate formerly of Washington, D.C. and now of West Cornwall, CT, who survives him. After Jerry completed his Army service, they settled in Arlington, VA, while Jerry began a career as a newspaper reporter and editor with newspapers there, including the Washington Post. This included assignments covering the Beatles' first American tour, and Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech on the National Mall. Jerry also profiled Washington big-wig Leonard Marks, who soon thereafter was appointed director of the former United States Information Service (since merged with the State Department), and offered Jerry a diplomatic position as the Press Attaché, or spokesman, of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Morocco.

?Jerry and Gretchen moved to Casablanca in 1966 for several years with their four sons, Tim, Ted, Jon and Mike. Matthew was born in Morocco. Jerry's second posting was to the U.S. embassy in Vientiane, Laos, in 1969, during the height of the U.S.'s secret air war in Laos. Since the U.S. at that time was denying its involvement in the bombing, the job of embassy spokesman required misleading the press on a daily basis. He ultimately quit this job as a matter of principle, but not before confidentially working with his former Washington Post colleague, Les Whitten, to help The Post prove U.S. involvement in the bombing of Laos. The story of how Jerry, Les and another American named Fred Branfman exposed the secret air war in Laos is told in a chapter of the 1979 book, "The Best of the Post." Jerry in 1973 published an influential anti-war op-ed in the New York Times about America's campaign of lies about U.S. involvement in Laos, later in large part reproduced in Howard Zinn's book, A People's History of the United States.

?When Jerry and Gretchen returned to the U.S. in 1972 with five young sons, they settled in West Cornwall, CT, directly across the street from the red covered bridge. Jerry continued his career as a freelance writer, publishing extensively in national periodicals such as Esquire and Playboy. He self-published a volume called Understanding Gum Disease (online version here), advertised in the classified section of Organic Gardening magazine, and over a period of years sold his full print run out of his home office via mail order. He also authored two non-fiction books in a Time-Life series on American wilderness areas: Canyons and Mesas (1974) and The Southern Appalachians (1975 ). For both books, Jerry and Gretchen packed the five boys up for extensive summer vacation research trips in their Chevy Suburban, sleeping together every night in a massive seven-person canvas tent in national parks and other campgrounds.

?During this period, the Vietnam conflict was coming to a close, and Jerry, still feeling the weight of America's involvement in that misbegotten war, organized several Northwest Corner churches to sponsor Vietnamese refugee families, including one family that lived for a period in an apartment in the Doolittle family home in West Cornwall. Jerry also personally sponsored a Laotian family, Khammone and Thongsai Mitsri and their children Pepe and Jojo, who thrived here and still live in Danbury, CT.

Jerry had a lifelong intense interest in politics, and joined the Jimmy Carter presidential campaign as a speechwriter and spokesman in 1976. That led ultimately to two years in the Carter White House as a presidential speechwriter, then two years as the head of public affairs for the Federal Aviation Administration.

?Jerry's first published novel, The Bombing Officer, about a young American diplomat caught up in the secret air war in Laos, came out in 1982. Jerry taught Expository Writing at Harvard from 1985-1990. The Cambridge, MA setting, combined with Jerry's many years watching various sons wrestle in high school, yielded the Tom Bethany novels – a series of six critically well-received murder mysteries featuring a Cambridge-based private investigator with progressive politics, an airplane pilot's license Olympic-level wrestling skills, and an ACLU litigator girlfriend. Starting with Body Scissors in 1990 and continuing annually thereafter, each volume was named after a different wrestling hold.

Post-Bethany, Jerry's writing started to focus on his blog, Bad Attitudes, where he and a few collaborators several times per week or more posted brilliant and often hilarious political and social commentary. Commercial publishers were not willing to take a chance on his masterpiece, The Dead Zoo, a novel inspired by Ronald Reagan's boyhood interest in taxidermy, and which Jerry's Tom Bethany editor Bill Grose, by then retired, called the creepiest book he ever read.
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Jerry had the true soul of an artist and creator, which in his case came with a strong sense that he actually had no option in life other than to pursue his craft as a writer, even when other easier routes were available, such as the lucrative communications position with a large New York bank that he turned down after serving in the Carter Administration. Having been functionally abandoned by his parents as a boy gave him a fierceness in his convictions and a survival-driven complete lack of interest in what others around him wanted or expected him to do. He had a single-minded dedication to excellence in whatever he deemed to be important – and if his list of what was important coincided with yours, then great; if not … still okay.

His pursuit of excellence in things he thought were important was relentless. In addition to his craft as a writer, he was a skillful whistler, a very able sketch artist, a photographer with an uncanny knack for capturing the explosiveness of plants, particularly in blossom, and later in life became one of the best sourdough bread bakers in the state. This came, quite typically, after he determined that good sourdough bread was unavailable in Northwest Connecticut, which to him just meant he would have to make his own. He thereupon set forth on a project of trial-and-error experimentation which in a year or so took him to near perfection – a steady supply of chewy but tender, delicately spiced or flavored loaves with a deep, rich sourness, all produced in a modestly appointed home kitchen.

He not only supplied himself and his family and friends with this superior bread, but also decided to sell loaves at the local farmer's market until he had enough money to buy a new, high-end Apple computer for his wife Gretchen.

He and Gretchen loved to have the house full over the holidays and in the summer. Jerry typically spent the weeks leading up to Easter recruiting every family with young children in the village of West Cornwall to come to Jerry and Gretchen's house for a massive Easter party and Easter egg hunt. Decades ago, he helped launch a series of extended family reunions where his own family got together with the families of his sister Patsy and brother Billy, the latest of which took place in July and included a joyful celebration of his 90th birthday.

He loved nothing better than playing with his many grandchildren when they were very small; when they got bigger, he didn't take them to the movies, ballgames or for ice cream like the other grandpas, but rather loaded them into his old Honda Element (he would pull the back seats out during his book research trips so he could sleep in Wal-Mart parking lots), and took off for adventures like meeting the cows and exploring the barn at the tiny Cornwall dairy farm where he picked up his raw milk every week, or driving them into remote wild corners of the Berkshires where he had located south-facing slopes with rattlesnake hangouts. Jerry would carefully – slowly and gently – lift up the pieces of corrugated tin, plywood or old carpet he had pre-positioned in the hope, often fulfilled, that the snakes would be waiting for him.

He is survived by his loving wife of nearly 68 years, Gretchen Doolittle of West Cornwall, CT; his sister, Patricia Shure of Ann Arbor; two brothers, William Doolittle, Jr. of East Stroudsburg, PA, and Mickey Doolittle of Colebrook, CT; and a step-brother, Ian Ingersoll of Cornwall, CT. Also surviving are five sons: Timothy and wife Colleen Doolittle of Oakdale, MN; Theodore Doolittle and wife Kathryn Engustian of West Hartford, CT; Jonathan Doolittle and wife Blair McElroy of Greenbrae, CA; Michael and wife Amity Doolittle of New Haven, CT; and Matthew Doolittle of New York, NY; as well as grandchildren Nick Hanzalik, Eliza Doolittle, Lauren Hanzalik, Bethany Doolittle, Sam Doolittle, Tessa Doolittle, Anayis Doolittle, Hannah Doolittle, Georgia Doolittle, Eve Doolittle, Wyatt Doolittle, and Brooks Doolittle .

Funeral services will be held at the North Cornwall Meeting House (United Church of Christ) on Cogswell Road in West Cornwall, CT on Sunday, December 3 at 12:30 p.m. A celebration of life for family and friends will also take place in 2024 at a time and place to be determined.