It’s heart-wrenching when someone you know dies but here is another fact: there are people in our lives who bless us by being on this earth while we’re on this earth. The light and joy of their friendship brightens our lives. When they pass on, we mourn, but there’s a special class of departed loved ones who make us smile and laugh every time we think of them.
And so it was–and is–with my, dear, wonderful. good-humored Colgate ’72 friend William “Bill Webb.” He passed away last week after a valient one month battle to recover from a severe stroke.
Bill was one of my FAVORITE classmates in Colgate ’72. We met and lived together at Shepardson House, which wasn’t a fraternity but was very much like one. Bill was 100 percent real. He was a happy, funny, consistently upbeat person who you instantly liked when you met him. Many of my Colgate friends didn’t know it but I suffered from severe depression on and off at Colgate. He was the only one who noticed the depth of it and seriously talked with me about it.
One day Bill came down to my dorm room when I was packing to leave Christmas vacation. Despite my mother’s best efforts to teach me, I couldn’t pack and fold properly and would get angrier and angrier, then finally shove the heap of clothes into my luggage, pound on it to make it fit, then sit on it to lock it. Bill came down and saw me pack and was roaring with laughter. After that he’d show up in my room each time before a vacation. “I’m here to watch you pack!” he’d say, and as I began the usual ritual he’d become hysterical, almost falling to the floor, saying “I can’t stand it!”
Once out of college Bill unsucessfully ran for office as a Republican in Democrat-dominated Massachusetts. In 1976 met Bonnie Shores while working at Abt Associates in Cambridge, MA. They married a year later. The Webbs then moved to California where Bill was publisher of high quality guidebooks placed in hotels in California. They moved back to the East Coast and, in 1983 bought a very large 8-bedroom house near Squam Lake in Holderness, NH, and transformed it into The Inn on Golden Pond bed and breakfast. They sold it in 2018 and retired.
How much did Bill’s Colgate friends love him? In the fall of 1983 (the late) attorney Mike Wallender called Bill and Bonnie under an assumed name and made reservations for our Shepardson group under fake names. We came from all over the country then and walked into the inn singing a Colgate song. Bill was stunned. That weekend was the reunion to end all reunions: a real, heartfelt one rather than an instutionally planned one.
I briefly stayed at the Inn in 2012 and 2015 while doing two tours of my school show throughout the U.S. and Canada. I had stayed at bed and breakfasts where the hosts seemed to be doing their jobs with guests but with Bill and Bonnie it was something special. Bill was the epitome of a friendly, good-humored innkeeper who treated his guests like family.
I couldn’t go the Colgate reunion in Hamilton, N.Y. last June. Bill and Bonnie met and united for the last time with some Colgate ’72 friends.
The Laconia Daily Sun published Bill’s obituary. Here’s part of it:
HOLDERNESS — William B. Webb, affectionately known to most as Bill, 72, of Holderness, passed peacefully from this life into eternity on April 19, at the Jack Byrne Hospice Center in Hanover. His immediate family had been in attendance at his bedside.
He was born in Portland, Maine, on June 15, 1950, the son of John and Ruth (Sherry) Webb. Bill was raised in Framingham, Masssachusetts, where he graduated from Framingham North High School class of 1968 and later attended Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, where he graduated in 1972 with a political science degree. He later married Bonnie L. (Shores) Webb and they settled in Framingham.
Bill was active in the Republican Party at a young age and ran for State Representative office in 1974 but was not elected. He then was employed by Leisure Guide, a book distributed in hotel rooms nationwide guiding guests to restaurants, shopping and attractions. This opportunity took Bill and Bonnie to Camarillo, California, for a short time. In 1980, a move back to New Hampshire provided an opportunity for Bill to start his own business with his wife, an 8-room bed and breakfast, which Bill named The Inn on Golden Pond. The business flourished and Bill retired in 2017, moving up the hill from the Inn overlooking Little Squam Lake.
…Bill is survived by his loving wife of 45 years, Bonnie L. (Shores) Webb; son, Richard and daughter-in-law, Krystal and their two children, Kyle and Logan of Belmont; daughter, Rebecca K. (Webb) Bartlett and son-in-law, Andrew, and their daughter Lilian, who reside in Kittery, Maine; his two brothers and sisters-in-law, John and Denby Webb of Shaker Heights, Ohio, and their children, John and Jennifer, and Robert and Susannah Webb of Glastonbury, Connecticut, and their children Gus, Lucy and Thomas
I think about Bill Webb and feel enormous loss and then I really think about Bill — and smile.
If you knew Bill Webb, you had to love him.
If you didn’t know him, you would have loved him if you knew him.
And if you knew him, you were blessed.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.