In Memoriam
Thomas Doane Perry, III
April 10, 2025
Doane Perry
1964 Yale graduation
Doane Perry died on April 9, 2025, of complications of Alzheimer's disease. We were notified of his death by his son, Curt Perry, who wrote:
I am so grateful for the stories, laughter, and love my dad's Thomas Doane Perry Ill family and friends shared as he comfortably rested for his final days at Berkshire Medical Center, passing peacefully from complications of Alzheimer's disease. It was a special gift to learn about the richness of my dad's earlier life from so many who walked with him in his myriad adventures. Remembering our shared journeys that my dad made possible has filled my heart through the tears. Thank you for all of the support, hugs, and grace from all of those in our lives.
Below are three essays written by Doane, published in three Yale ’64 Reunion Books through the years, as well as a remembrance by Tony Lavely ’64, our Class Secretary.
- Remembrance by Tony Lavely ’64
- Essay, 60th Reunion Book, 2024
- Essay, 50th Reunion Book, 2014
- Essay, 25th Reunion Book, 1989
Remembrance by Tony Lavely ’64, Class Secretary
Tony Lavely
April 11, 2025
While I am saddened by the death of any 1964 classmate, I especially grieve the passing of Doane Perry. Doane was a tough guy right to the end of his life. Though he was failing with Alzheimer’s, he and Karen attended our 60th Class reunion in May 2024 and added his personal essay to our Reunion Book [see below]. After that he and Karen joined the Boston-area Zoom calls on third Wednesdays, just to hear our voices. His last participation was three weeks before his death.
Essay, 60th Reunion Book
by Doane Perry ’64
May 2024
Doane Perry
60th Reunion Book
My life since 2018: We sold our house in Cambridge, ended our Bed and Breakfast in 2018, and moved to our family home, The Knoll, in West Stockbridge in the Berkshires. I was elected to the West Stockbridge Select Board in the spring. After many years I stopped writing for the local papers Richmond Record and the Local Yokel. While we had our reunion, my son Curt Perry graduated from Yale with an MD/PhD in immunology, holding his daughter Julia while he received his degree, and his wife Rachel began her own Perry lab at Yale Medical School. My son Tod Perry moved back from Europe, where he had worked in renewable energy and managed programs at E.On.
I mowed the fields with a tractor and the lawn with a zero-turn radius mower. I took photos every day while Karen painted Plein Air. I sailed at the Boat Club and enjoyed the visits of our children. My son Tod Perry came with his three teenage children, Bud, Jack, and Charlotte, and made wonderful dinners while we enjoyed the pool together. As winter approached, we chopped wood, gathered around the fire, cooked, and read aloud to each other. We watched icicles form and made paths around The Knoll to snowshoe and cross-country ski. All this peace was punctuated by the regular Select Board meetings, trying to make decisions that are fair and just for all the people in West Stockbridge.
It had been an incredibly icy winter, and after Karen’s sharp fall, we crunched the numbers and realized that it was cheaper to move three years early into my mother’s retirement community rather than to risk falling. So we chose a subset of favorite things and moved into Kimball Farms on January 9, 2020 to avoid the perils of ice.
Only it wasn’t three years early. It was three weeks.
I decided that I shouldn’t complete the third year of my term on the Select Board. So I resigned. My ability to keep many factors in mind while making important decisions for the town was too difficult. The neurologist recommended donepezil (Aricept) and I didn’t get worse. The next spring he recommended memantine (Namenda) which only makes a difference 15% of the time. But three weeks later everyone could see the difference.
COVID made us isolate. Kimball Farms took good care of us, but our kids wisely insisted we go back to The Knoll for the summer. We still haven’t had COVID. We enjoy beautiful views of the Berkshires, walks, and good food at Kimball Farms. Good company and conversation enrich our lives. This summer my stepdaughter Betsy Rodman (Wiscasset, Maine) and Glen Kalliope Dalto celebrated Phoenix Dalto’s graduation from Yale with a new job at Deloitte! I love the poetry class here taught by a Yale professor. I enjoy monthly Zooms with my family and with our classmates of Old and New England. I am involved with five committees here at Kimball Farms so I keep busy. We look forward to welcoming you to the Berkshires!
Essay, 50th Reunion Book
by Doane Perry ’64
May 2014
Growing up with my father working at the Boston Symphony Orchestra, I saw music as the great art form. I worked at a jazz festival in Lenox called Music Inn and heard all the jazz stars of the 50’s and 60’s. My favorite world music is soucous, the Congolese music I danced to in nightclubs of Uganda. I am into contemporary classical music and serve on the board of Collage New Music in Boston.
Yale’s History, the Arts, and Letters major taught me to appreciate the history of ideas. From doing anthropology field work in Greece, I admire the notion that trained individual analysts can discover and describe society. I am a lifelong amateur astrophysicist, reading and learning from guests at our Bed & Breakfast in Cambridge.
My mother was a Philadelphia Quaker, and Hingham Quaker Meeting often met in our living room, but the best program for young people was at Unitarian Old Ship Church. Today my wife Karen Carmean and I are active members of Friends Meeting at Cambridge.
Karen, born in San Francisco, grew up in Tacoma, and was an exchange student in Geneva and history major in the last all-women’s class at Vassar. Where I am a photographer, she is an oil painter, and we have been exhibiting at the same gallery in Pittsfield.
After teaching in Greece, Uganda, New York, and Newton and graduate school and field work in Greece, I got a Ph.D. in visual anthropology and became the anthropology lecturer at Lasell University in Newton.
While exploring the industries where I could apply anthropology, I volunteered to serve on the cable-franchising committee for the town of Brookline. Later as a consultant I helped cable companies win franchises by identifying local needs. I became an analyst at the International Data Corporation in Framingham, until Digital Equipment Corporation recruited me to join their consultant relations group in Marlboro. When Digital failed, I formed Aspinwall Associates to do telecommunications research.
Volunteer work has been very important to me, starting with the Peace Corps and continuing with Boston, Uganda, and national Peace Corps alumni and advocacy groups. I keep track of and promote films and videos made by Peace Corps Volunteers. I have been a Brookline Public Library trustee, president of Mid Cambridge Neighborhood Association, and secretary of Cambridge Action Fund, which raises funds for homeless in Cambridge and Somerville.
Curt and Doane Perry
A parent since 1971, I married my first wife Barbara Aliferis in Gibraltar and gained two stepchildren in her children Betsy and Flicka Rodman. Our son Tod grew up in Brookline and Groton and went to Groton, Earlham, and Harvard. Tod works for the German power company E.ON and lives in England with his wife Kate Oates and children Charlotte, Jack, and Bud. Karen and I have another son Curt who grew up in Cambridge and went to the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, Yale, and Yale Medical School in the M.D./Ph.D. immunology program. He married Rachel Jamison, who has her Yale Ph.D. in Type 2 Diabetes research.
Essay, 25th Reunion Book
by Doane Perry ’64
May 1998
As I write this, I’m feeling good because I’m about to leave for a business and bicycling trip to southern France, I am enjoying good health and job, my family members are all alive and healthy, and I’m enjoying the qualities of life at both ends of Massachusetts, with houses in Cambridge and Richmond.
But where life has taken my career — working for computer and network manufacturer Digital Equipment Corporation — was entirely unforeseen by me at the time I left Yale. Actually I don’t do engineering, I do marketing, but except for having a line of engineers in the family and building models as a child, there was no reason to predict I’d come to be employed by the second largest computer company in the world.
I think a major explanation for my career path is an analogy to a moth seeking to be near the source of the greatest available heat and light. Even so, changing jobs used to bother me, since my father held one job for thirty years managing the Boston Symphony Orchestra, but now I see moving on as the norm.
The questions I get asked most are, how did I move from being a teacher into computers, and how did I like being in the Peace Corps in Idi Amin land. The answers are, one small step at a time, and fine because I left before Amin took over.
Digital hired me to develop worldwide marketing programs that persuade industry consultants to recommend Digital systems to their customers, because I became a leading analyst and consultant in the telecommunications industry during four years at one of the major market research and consulting companies in the industry, Pat McGovern’s International Data Corporation. I came to IDC from a brief stint at another well-known industry-analyst firm, Howard Anderson’s The Yankee Group.
Before The Yankee Group, I worked with Claire Stern Associates as a consultant to the cable-television industry during the peak of its efforts to win franchises from U.S. cities and counties. As an anthropologist, I was useful to the cable industry’s effort to differentiate itself from broadcast television by providing programming and local-area video networks that met community needs. We also figured out the physical and political factors that determined where fiber-optic communication cables could be laid through cities and towns.
I taught anthropology at Lasell Junior College in Newton, MA, for four years until consulting travel made it impossible to meet classes regularly. I did anthropology field work, in the anthropology of visual communication and in ethnography, in the village of Areopolis, in the Mani, on the Peloponnesus, in Greece. My Ph.D. is from Union Graduate School in Cincinnati, a “without-walls” institution that evolved out of Antioch College.
I went to graduate school from teaching social studies in the Newton, MA, public schools and at the United Nations International School in Manhattan. The U.N. school was my first job after returning from teaching World and East African History in Uganda for the Peace Corps, and from a subsequent six months as a hippie in the Seychelles, India, Nepal, and Ceylon.
While I joined the Peace Corps to avoid going to Vietnam, I continued in teaching after the Peace Corps because I’d found teaching to be a pretty creative line of work, contrary to my preconception of the profession as making your way through a curriculum that someone else wrote.
Uganda was the beautiful “pearl of Africa” mixing mountains, savannah, jungle, rivers, and lakes within a small area, and cool because it sits a mile high even though it’s at the Equator. Peace Corps Volunteers filled pre-existing, status jobs as “O-level” teachers in boarding schools which contained students from all the tribes and language groups in the country in a vain effort to overcome tribal divisions.
I trained for Uganda at Columbia University, not at the Business School where I’d been admitted for an M.B.A. but at the Teachers College, where my state draft board finally said they wouldn’t take me.
Before the Peace Corps I spent a year attending the University in West Berlin in musicology and German, and a year teaching English at Anatolia College in Thessaloniki, Greece.
At Yale, I majored in History, the Arts, and Letters, lived in Morse, worked on the Yale Daily News, started a controlled-circulation magazine called the College Ski with some good guys in Stiles, and rode a motorcycle. I came to Yale from three years at Exeter where I swam and rowed. I grew up around Boston in Cambridge, Arlington, and Hingham.
Enough. I’ll have to show you my fine wife and children who will be four, thirteen, twenty-four, and twenty-seven at reunion time. It’s time to go to France.