Jeptha Wade, 83, lawyer was trustee for Boston museums

JEPTHA H. WADE

Not far from Jeptha H. Wade's childhood home on Magnolia Drive, on the far side of a park that bears his family's name, stands the Cleveland Museum of Art, where he strolled through galleries upon returning home from school on many winter days when brisk winds blew off Lake Erie.

"His mother would say, 'All right, go out and walk for an hour,' " Emily Wade said of her husband's afternoon sojourns among paintings and sculptures. "And it was much nicer to walk through the museum than walk outside in the Cleveland winters."

Those visits helped develop Mr. Wade's appreciation for permanence and lasting accomplishment, the kinds of things he later nurtured in his roles as a museum trustee in Boston and as a lawyer handling trusts.

A descendant and namesake of the founder of Western Union, Mr. Wade had lived for the past 57 years in a house he and his wife purchased in Bedford. He spent most of his career at the Boston law firm Choate Hall & Stewart and served as a trustee of the Children's Museum, Museum of Science, and Museum of Fine Arts. Mr. Wade died Aug. 8 in Lahey Clinic Medical Center in Burlington. He was 83 and had suffered a stroke.

"He was a monumental leader and a statesman here at the museum and had a vision for this institution that we've finally been able to realize: to be a true convener, a gathering place for all the children in Boston," said Lou Casagrande, Children's Museum president. "And he had a global view; he saw the big picture for the museums and arts and culture in Boston. I'm missing him a lot already. He was larger than life - the lion of the Boston Children's Museum."

With a keen mind for finance, Mr. Wade helped guide the investments of law clients, museums, and his alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he served for many years on the MIT Corporation board.

"First of all, he was extremely smart - that was one of the things you could quickly realize about him," David Scudder, chairman of Aureus Asset Management in Boston, said of Mr. Wade and his work on MIT's investments. "He asked concise, but always accurate, questions, and he was right on top of an issue. He certainly was a major contributor to the success of how the MIT endowment and retirement funds did back in the 1980s and '90s."

More than just a steady hand on the financial tiller, Mr. Wade "was a great pleasure to work with because he was open and he was fun," Scudder said. "That's something not to be forgotten. He had a great sense of humor, and it was a delight to be in the same room with him."

Mr. Wade's spirit and vitality also stood out at Choate, where he worked from 1956 until retiring as a senior partner in 1990.

"He was as full of life as anybody I've ever known," said Davis Dassori, a partner at the firm who has known Mr. Wade for 40 years. "He just burst with energy, and I think that was the defining characteristic all the way through. He was always exploding with ideas."

That vigor slackened only slightly in retirement. Just a few days before Mr. Wade died, he called Choate with some ideas about "a situation that was going to arise as a result of some investment changes we were making in the firm, generally," Dassori said. "He was still ahead of the curve."

Mr. Wade graduated from the University School in Cleveland, and then studied business and mechanical engineering at MIT, from which he graduated in 1946. While there he met Emily Vanderbilt after they were nudged in each other's directions by relatives from each of their families. They married in March 1945.

Excluded from military service because of hay fever and poor eyesight, Mr. Wade volunteered as an ambulance driver for the American Field Service and left for India two months after marrying. He was standing by for an invasion of Burma when the war ended.

Mr. Wade worked in business for a year after MIT, and then went to Harvard Law School, graduating in 1950. Before being hired by Choate, he worked at MIT as a lawyer specializing in intellectual property.

During the early part of the Kennedy administration, he took time away from the firm to volunteer as an assistant to John McCloy, who was chairman of the general advisory committee on disarmament of the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in Washington, D.C.

Returning to Choate in 1961, Mr. Wade's advocacy for arms control continued, and he served as president of the Lawyers Alliance for Nuclear Arms Control, which later became the Lawyers Alliance for World Security.

Never one to remain office-bound, Mr. Wade liked to hunt and to spend time fishing the rivers of Colorado, Montana, and the province of Quebec. He also took a personal hand in planning the sustainable harvest of trees on family land in Thomaston, Ga.

But at work, where his facility with trusts and investments was legendary, his death was profoundly felt. Dassori said one of Mr. Wade's former clients sent an e-mail that read in part:

"He was there with and for me as I made many changes in my life. You and I can hear him and his wisdom. His life shows us so much and guides us so well. . . . I will remember how calm and sure his knowledge was. And he was always right."

In addition to his wife, Mr. Wade leaves two sons, William of Unity, Maine, and Randall of Ashfield; two daughters, Emily Wade Hughey of Brookline and Rebecca Wade Comstock of Chappaqua, N.Y.; two sisters, Elizabeth Sedgwick of Lexington and Ellen Chinn of Cleveland; five granddaughters; and three grandsons.

A memorial service will be held at 3 p.m. Saturday in First Parish in Bedford Unitarian Universalist Church.