F. Charles “Chuck” Froelicher, an educator and conservationist who believed strongly in the value of the outdoors experience for strengthening young minds and bodies, and who Time Magazine identified as the only headmaster with an earned reputation for doing an eskimo roll in a kayak, died peacefully at his home in Denver, Colorado on October 17, 2014. He was 89.
“Although we knew it was coming, his death still came as a shock to our family,” wrote three of his grandchildren in an open letter to friends. “We were all convinced he was invincible.”
Since the mid-60’s, he and his late wife, Jane Stuart “Stuie” Froelicher, were beloved seasonal members of the West Chop community, hosting family and friends in the imposing house named Soundside, a classic West Chop Victorian shingle-style summer “cottage” overlooking Vineyard Sound that had been in Stuie’s family as a result of poor weather — her maternal grandfather, Cutler B. Downer, the original owner, found himself fog-bound in Vineyard Haven Harbor and decided to explore the Island.
“They were terrific as a couple,” friend and West Chop club member Bob Doran said, “but also strong as individuals.” In her teens Stuie ran the Group program for children and in her later years served as club president, “and Chuck had his causes,” Mr. Doran said.
Most of Chuck Froelicher’s career took place in Colorado, where he raised two children, Franz and Frederica with his first wife, Patricia, but he was born in New Jersey in 1924 to an esteemed family of educators rooted in Quaker beliefs and the progressive education ideas of John Dewey. The family moved to Baltimore in 1931, where Chuck and his four siblings attended the Park School, founded by their grandfather, Hans Froelicher Sr. in 1912, and where their father, Hans Froelicher Jr., became headmaster after leaving his law practice during the Depression.
Chuck was a Navy man, a graduate of Johns Hopkins University, a lover of the outdoors, a master planner, and a man who knew how to get things done.
Moving to Colorado in 1955, he became the founding headmaster of Colorado Academy, the prime mover in bringing Outward Bound to the United States, the first executive director of the Gates Family Foundation, a founder of the Copper Mountain ski resort, and a force behind establishing both the Sangree Hut in the 10th Mountain Division hut system and the South Platte River Greenway that runs through Denver.
In 1961, the Colorado Outward Bound School was the first established in the Western Hemisphere. His advocacy for Outward Bound gave new meaning to the concept of “mens sana in corpore sano,” the healthy mind in the healthy body. Strengthened by skills training and physical exertion, tested by stressful, even life-threatening situations, students felt compelled to act for themselves and for others.
“What I focused on when bringing Outward Bound to the United States,” Chuck told an interviewer, “was to provide an outdoor educational program that invited students to discover their outer limits. The motto ‘To serve, to strive, and not to yield’ was not just a motto; it was a mission.”
Numerous awards attest to his focus, drive, and accomplishment.
“I had the perfect background to start a school, because I have always had enormous sympathy for students who do not mature academically on a date certain,” he said in a 2012 interview. “I had more confidence in latent ability than most headmasters and most teachers.”
Chuck Froelicher was inspired at Colorado Academy by the “learning by doing” ideas of Dewey and at the Colorado Outward Bound School by Kurt Hahn’s philosophy of “learning by doing more than you think you can.” He summarized his work with the Gates Family Foundation as “investing environmental and educational venture capital,” and he credited his second wife, Stuie, with “raising the level of everything that went on around her.”
Chuck’s salient characteristic, according to West Chop resident David Beim, was his tenacity. “Chuck not only had inspiring ideas,” he said. “He pushed them forward and built them into living, enduring institutions.”
In 1987, he brought that tenacity to bear when he enlisted in the successful effort to prevent the town of Tisbury from turning a 75-acre parcel, now known as West Chop Woods, into the site of a wastewater treatment plant.
When three competing golf course developers appeared on the Island in 1998 with plans for new golf clubs, Chuck, a member of the board of Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation, called for an objective assessment of all three proposals, a stance that subjected him to attack at the same time that he was being honored for his conservation leadership in Colorado. He was undeterred in his view that a working partnership was the way to proceed to conserve a 400-acre parcel in Oak Bluffs known as the Southern Woodlands.
Chuck Froelicher is survived by a son, Franz Froelicher, and a daughter, Frederica Froelicher, from his marriage to the late Patricia Barrett Froelicher; a brother, Frederic Sharpless Froelicher; a nephew, Robert Keyser; four step-children from his marriage to the late Jane Stuart Righter Woolley Froelicher: Susannah Bristol, Charles Woolley, Christopher Woolley, and Thomas Woolley; and 10 grandchildren.
A biography of Froelicher by Katherine Millett written in 2014, Profile of a Schoolmaster, is available on the Colorado Academy website in the Alumni section.
A celebration of life service will be held on November 1 at 11 am in the Newton Gymnasium at Colorado Academy in Denver. Memorial gifts may be sent to the F. Charles Froelicher Fund for Colorado Academy,
3800 South Pierce Street, Denver, CO 80235 or to another charity of the donor’s choice.