Music teacher, 58, touched many lives
He collapsed in Athens during school band trip
Just hours after her father collapsed and died in Athens moments before a scheduled flight home with his high school jazz band, Dennis Wrenn's oldest daughter drove to Logan Airport to meet his students.
Jessica Wrenn Still said she had not intended to speak.
But surrounded by the stunned and grieving students Friday night, her father's body still in Greece, she began to speak words of comfort to the group. In his final phone message to her, she told them, he had praised the group and called the trip the best of his nearly four-decade career as a music teacher and band director.
"[I wanted] to say thank you for being with my dad," Still said, and "let them know that it was comforting not only that he didn't die alone, but that he died where he would have wanted to be, doing what he did best, with his students."
Wrenn, 58, was an outsized man with a gregarious nature, an ever-present smile, and a passion for three things: his family, hockey, and sharing music - especially with the young people he taught at Algonquin Regional High School in Northborough, where he was director of instrumental music and chairman of fine and performing arts.
"Just a phenomenal guy. He was tops," said Romeo Marquis, Algonquin's principal in the mid-1990s. Marquis called Wrenn one of the best and most caring educators he has encountered in more than 40 years in the field.
Wrenn formed lasting bonds with students, parents, and colleagues. He doted on the musically gifted and tone deaf alike.
"I'm just overwhelmed by the bar he set for all of us who are in education to make such an impact on the lives of students," said Charles E. Gobron, superintendent of schools in Northborough and Southborough.
That much is evident from the scores of online messages posted on a Facebook tribute to Wrenn in the hours following his death.
One after another, they described a man who would drop everything to write recommendation letters, open recording rooms on weekends, prepare arrangements, and listen. Wrenn had a voice that carried over instruments, a collection of keys that jangled, and a cellphone that went off to the tune of Monty Python's "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" - a favorite of his from the comedy troupe's "Life of Brian" and "Spamalot," which he saw on Broadway multiple times.
"He was indispensable," said Bret Steiman, the Algonquin junior who created the Facebook memorial, which had 1,200 members and counting by yesterday evening. Steiman met Wrenn through school musicals, but he saw his reach everywhere. "There's really nothing that went on that Wrenn wasn't involved with, whether it be the PA system for the assemblies or getting the OK for having a student join a class or even selecting the new principal."
Wrenn did it all with gusto, if not perfect balance. In college, where he played hockey at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, he fell out the window of his fraternity house while celebrating Bobby Orr's now-legendary 1970 goal to win the Stanley Cup. Years later, Wrenn fell off a stage while conducting a student concert and broke an arm, but went ahead and finished the performance.
Raised in Grafton, Wrenn taught music in multiple Boston suburbs before settling at the Northborough-Southborough school. There, his student ensembles filled trophy cases with their competition winnings. Wrenn carried a nearly full teaching load while overseeing the department, advising a number of clubs, producing school musicals, and leading staff development initiatives.
"He was always there. He wasn't a teacher who just packed it in at the end of the day and left," said Brian Gustafson, a 1995 graduate who said Wrenn helped shape his career; he now teaches music at a Franklin elementary school.
Wrenn played and taught music with groups and organizations outside of school. He particularly loved jazz. Every fall, he arranged the music and played trumpet for the king at King Richard's Faire, the weekend Renaissance festival in Carver. Wrenn could not sing, but he was a master of several instruments, and he possessed an ear that allowed him to play back whatever he heard on piano.
Although Wrenn and his wife, Elizabeth Johnson, divorced in the early 1980s, they remained close friends, sharing in celebration and holidays, running a music camp together, and raising their children - Still, now 32; Elizabeth Nichols, 30, of Shrewsbury; and Scott Wrenn, 29, of Auburn - all three children said yesterday. He doted on his four grandchildren and spent his remaining time following the Bruins as a season ticket holder.
A week before his scheduled February vacation trip with the jazz band, Wrenn had a respiratory cold and broke multiple ribs coughing. His doctor advised him to rest, worried about fluid buildup in his lungs.
Dennis Wrenn made the trip anyway.
"He was so amped up to go to Greece, because he didn't want to disappoint the kids," said Still, who originally planned to accompany the group with her husband but canceled after starting a new job.
With customary stubbornness - Dennis Wrenn kept playing hockey into adulthood until he was slowed by three hip replacements - he immersed himself in the trip. He let students carry his bags but otherwise was there for everything, conducting, riding donkeys, posing for pictures amid ruins.
Her father collapsed upon disembarking the bus at the airport, Still said.
Students boarded the plane thinking he had been hospitalized and learned of his death after departing, she said.
Dennis Wrenn's family is awaiting the return of his body from Greece, where the cause of death is being determined, before completing funeral arrangements. Yesterday, Algonquin Regional offered grief counseling at the school. Many students and parents attended. The jazz band, missing its conductor, played an impromptu set.
"It was a very touching and moving tribute to Dennis, that they were able to pull themselves together and play the way they did," said John Mauro Jr., Southborough's fire chief. His daughter, Victoria, a senior who plays alto saxophone, was one of two dozen students on the trip to Greece. 