 REMEMBRANCE OF JOHN FOX
By Oliver Houck, Harvard Class of 1960 Classmate
(Please also see the traditional obituary following Oliver’s beautiful piece)
Dear colleagues, I would like to add a personal note to the excellent one previously published in this magazine.
To begin, I had to be John’s public enemy number one at Leveret House. He would be trying to study by his window facing the courtyard, as Gary Pildner and I were cavorting outside, banging Frisbees against the wall and shouting at each other as they bounced away, uncaught, and fell to the ground. John’s luck turned yet worse in winter, when Al Butzel and I retreated to the cellar corridors, an echo-chamber of cement and cinder-block walls, to play yet another game with hockey sticks and a rolled-up sock, and anything-goes. Unfortunately, we were directly below John’s room, and the decibels were considerable. The first sentence I ever heard from John was when he came down the stairs, pleading: “can’t you please keep it down!” It was not a question. Then again, he was a history major, and his assignments were apparently rather demanding.
I linked up with John again a few years later, when I returned from Korea and was now a federal prosecutor in Washington D.C. We would meet up and run together, either at the track at American University or up the horse trails along Rock Creek Parkway. To this day I repeat stretching exercises he showed me as we warmed up for a run, him telling me to keep my knee straight but not saying it that way …which would have been my way, the New Jersey way. Instead, he said “isn’t it hard not to bend your knee?” Think about the tact of that phrase, pure John. Of course. Once we began running it was a different story.
John had married by that time, a lovely woman from California named Gretchen, who had invited me for dinner at their townhouse near Dupont Circle. That particular evening John and I had been playing volleyball at the YMCA, he, all of about five-foot-ten but able to levitate and hit devastating slams. So, Gretchen brought out a plate with a dark, skinny object to the table that she said was a snake. When I didn’t react, John added that they didn’t know what kind of snake …maybe from Rock Creek … could it be poisonous? All deadpan. In this she and John were peas in a pod.
On another occasion, I was prosecuting a drug case down, and they gave me a a photo in a little frame showing a policeman in full uniform on a white horse in a field of yellow flowers, the title reading “Cop Out at the Fair!”. A very hippy-California thing at the time. It took me weeks to get the point. And years, before I came to realize that criminalizing drugs was insane.
During one long jog, John went one better in pulling my chain. We were talking about high school, and I mentioned my heartthrob of the time: Joan Kylo, Chief Baton Twirler for the Westfield Senior High School Blue Devils Marching Band, and clearly, by definition, out of my league. Of course, I’d never even asked her out. Months later I got a note from John saying that, while in a naked co-ed sauna in California (which seemed perfectly plausible), he sat next to a good-looking blonde named Joan, from Westfield New Jersey. Did she know Oliver Houck? Oh my yes, she said, he was real cute but he would never ask me out. When I did not reply to John’s letter, he wrote again to reveal more detail about the Kylo encounter, which became yet more lurid as it went on. I sat on it for a day or so, dismayed by my lost opportunity, until it hit me that John had been pulling my leg all along. We never talked about it, but I know that he knew he’d scored.
There was a third facet to John that I also found endearing. John the activist, the tilter-at-windmills, John Quixote. He and Gretchen had moved to Amherst and were taking on the town council over projects that seemed bent on turning the community into a shopping-mall, high-rise, Any-town, USA. John went into the lists against them, all-in until the game was over, and usually lost. He was defending his town, to be sure, but this passion came from Gretchen, and he was defending the person he loved.
Last but not least, there was of course his mission on the Tax Code, yet another windmill and mission impossible rolled into one. John’s struggle to make the Code more humane has been noted by others, but his determination to pursue it to the end was, once again, in his genes.
Now comes the hard part. As has been earlier noted in this magazine, John Fox died, very suddenly, toward the end of 2018. In fact, it was part of a double-tragedy which began when Gretchen was diagnosed with an irreversible cancer of the tongue. She could hardly swallow, or even speak. Undaunted, they decided on a final visit to her daughter, then living in Australia. They booked the flight hurriedly and were on the ground in Melbourne for all of a day. The next day John suffered a heart attack. On the following day, a fatal one. I do not believe anyone knew the cause, but it seems plausible that the prospect of losing Gretchen played a role.
Gretchen then returned alone to Amherst, where a memorial was held for John. Gretchen, obviously in pain, kept mumbling, “I don’t understand what is happening here”. Many of us spoke, too many perhaps, because they had so many friends, and they all thought they were his best friend. That’s the way they were, and how they made you feel.
Gretchen died a few weeks later. They are survived by their daughter Margaret, their son Joseph, and their best of all friends, Bob Repetto, ’60, who had been close to John at home and abroad, and could read him like a book.
As I say, for many of us it is hard not to remember them.
Oliver Houck, ’60
JOHN O. FOX, a longtime Amherst resident and seasoned tax lawyer who taught and wrote extensively about the social and political significance of the tax code, died on September 12, 2018 at age 79. He died of cardiac arrest in Sydney, Australia where he and his wife Gretchen were visiting their family.
John was born on October 6, 1938 in Los Angeles and grew up in southern California, preparing at Beverly Hills High School in Beverly Hills, CA where he excelled in academics and athletics. He graduated from Harvard College in 1960 (magna cum laude in History; member of Leverett House) and studied at the London School of Economics, before returning to California to earn an LL.B. in 1964 at Boalt Hall Law School in Berkeley, California.
John began his law career at the Arent Fox law firm in Washington D.C., while also earning an L.L.M in tax law from Georgetown Law School. In 1968, John co-founded the law firm of Sherman, Fox, Meehan and Curtin, where he worked until 2000.
In 1964, John married Gretchen Gause, who was organizing humanities outreach programs for the University of California Medical School in San Francisco. The two were introduced by John’s beloved sister, Myra Fox. While living in Washington D.C., the couple had two children, Joseph (1970) and Margaret (1973).
In 1985, the family moved to Amherst, Massachusetts where John continued to practice law, but also launched a teaching career. For more than three decades, John taught tax and public policy at Mt. Holyoke College. He also wrote many articles about tax policy and the books, If Americans Really Understood the Income tax: Uncovering Our Most Expensive Ignorance (2001) and Ten Tax Questions That the Candidates Don't Want You to Ask (2004). In his writing, teaching and public speaking, John sought to show the many ways tax law both reflects and shapes society's evolving political values. He argued that the tax code should be made simpler and fairer to promote social justice and a healthy democracy.
With his wife Gretchen, John was also active in Amherst political and zoning issues. He was an elected member of the Amherst Town Meeting for 25 years, and fought unsuccessfully in 2018 to preserve the town meeting form of government for the community.
John is survived by his wife, Gretchen G. Fox, his son Joe Fox and his partner Stephanie Schriock, his daughter Margaret Fox and son-in-law Andrew Carroll, and granddaughters Jessica and Hazel.
A private memorial service was held October 6, 2018, on what would have been Mr. Fox's 80th birthday. Contributions in his memory may be made to Neighbor to Neighbor Massachusetts, 15 Court Square, Suite 345, Boston, MA 02108.
Published (though this version is slightly revised) in Daily Hampshire Gazette on Oct. 10, 2018.
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