Curtis on water striders in a favorite creek.
Obituary
Early pubradio naturalist
Vermont’s Will Curtis, 94
Will Curtis, former voice of The Nature of Things on Vermont Public Radio, one of the first pubradio programs to address environmental concerns, died April 18 in his sleep at home in Woodstock, Vt. He was 94.
“Amid evocations of the state’s ever popular maple syrup and fall foliage, he would slip in a lesson on how to swing a scythe,” the Boston Globe noted in a remembrance May 6. “Listening by satellite, everyone from farmers to urban dwellers thousands of miles away would marvel at how he turned the mechanics of mowing by hand into a kind of plainspoken poetry.”
Curtis’s commentaries began airing on VPR in 1978 and were nationally syndicated starting in 1981. After funding for national broadcasts ended in 1998, his pieces appeared on VPR until 2004. His work was compiled in two books, The Nature of Things (1988) and The Second Nature of Things (1992).
Willis Lansing Curtis was born Sept. 25, 1917, in Marlborough, Mass., son of John Arnold and Dorothy Rumsey Curtis. He attended Westminster School in Simsbury, Conn., and graduated from Vermont Academy in 1936. He married Jane Pitkin of Scituate, Mass., in 1940.
The couple moved to Vermont in the 1960s to raise Jersey cattle and run a dairy farm. They purchased the Yankee Bookshop in Woodstock. Curtis fell into his radio career while advertising for the bookshop on a local AM station.
He was preceded in death by four brothers and a daughter, Elizabeth. He is survived by his wife; daughter, Katherine (William) Donahue of Hartland; sister, Louise Hahn of Ontario, Canada; three grandsons, Thomas, Samuel and James and a great-granddaughter.
Services were held May 7 in Woodstock. The family suggested gifts to the Vermont Institute of Natural Science, 6565 Woodstock Road, Route 4, P.O. Box 1281, Quechee, VT 05059; or to the Woodstock Historical Society, 26 Elm St., Woodstock, VT 05091. — Dru Sefton
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