NORWICH — Jack Shepherd was a crack news reporter and a big thinker, but that didn’t keep him from seeing the people right in front of him.

Returning decades later to the continent on which he had cut his teeth as a young journalist in his 20s, Shepherd guided groups of Dartmouth College undergraduate students in a foreign studies program through east and southern Africa.

If he noticed a student who was especially intimidated by being in a new place, or not being able to speak a language, Shepherd tactfully gave them some cash to go out on their own and buy something like a loaf of bread for the group.

“They would have this discrete small task to help get over that fear,” said Laura Donohue, a former student of Shepherd’s. “He gave them little baby steps, but he never made them feel lesser. He’d watch for things like that. He had all these gentle ways that students couldn’t even see.”

Donohue, now a law professor at Georgetown University in Washington, remained close with Shepherd long after he was her teacher. “A lot of times, people as smart as him live in their heads, or they’re unreachable,” she said. “He wasn’t like that. He was so supportive, and he gave his students wings.”

The keen eye for observation that Shepherd honed in his career as a writer, which landed his byline in publications includingthe New York Times, the Atlantic, and Harper’s, was also alert in his personal life. And it was a hopeful one.

“It’s a special characteristic to be able to really see and believe the best in somebody,” Shepherd’s son, Caleb, said. “I think that was kind of, without even intending, his magic. It’s like this special gift, but I don’t think its something he did intentionally. It was just him. It was how he saw the world.”

Shepherd, 85, died at his home in Norwich following complications from squamous cell cancer.

With their children Caleb and Kristen in tow, Shepherd and Kathleen, his wife of 63 years, moved to the Upper Valley in the 1970s after a stint in New York City. There, Shepherd had been the managing editor of Look Magazine, one of the large color print magazines of the ‘60s.

He knew how to “follow an interest,” Kathleen said, and that hunt often landed him right in the thick of things. As a staff writer for Look, Shepherd interviewed activist Stokely Carmichael in Lowndes County, Ga. at the height of the civil rights movement. He covered the drug culture of the “summer of love” in 1967, and he edited Martin Luther King’s editorials for the magazine just before King’s assassination in 1968.

Shepherd was also a prolific, wide-ranging, and collaborative author. He penned 10 books, from a satirical “epistolary” poking fun at President Lyndon B. Johnson with longtime friend and New York Times foreign correspondent Chris Wren, of Thetford, to the bestselling “Runner’s Handbook.” In 2010, he wrote his final book, “Hunger: The Biology and Politics of Starvation,” with his Dartmouth colleague — and his cardiologist — John Butterly.

“We came from different worlds,” Butterly said. “I’m a physician, and he came more from the arts side of the track, but we collaborated beautifully. He taught me a lot of things about writing, presenting, and about how he saw the world as a journalist. He shared himself with me, in a very open way.”

At Look, he and two friends (“They were sort of the young chargers of that place,” Kathleen said), designed the first Earth Day flag, hanging it out of an office window above Madison Avenue. The original version, which has been replicated for decades, still hangs from the Shepherds’ deck in Norwich.

But it was an early assignment for the magazine that sparked an interest that would abide with Shepherd for the rest of his life. On the magazine’s dime, he sent himself to east Africa, where he covered stories ranging from a separatist war in Nigeria to the repatriation of the 16th century Benin Bronzes to the Nigerian government.

“Jack loved all things Africa,” Kathleen said. It was an absorption that would shape the entirety of his career, even after he left journalism.

Following his time at Look, Shepherd landed at the United Nations, and later secured a newly-minted reporting fellowship funded by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think tank. Outdoors at a restaurant in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, fighter jets started flying over Shepherd’s head. Finding himself amid history-making events again, he was seated below the unseating of Emperor Haile Selassie.

“The revolution had begun while they were sitting at the restaurant,” his wife said.

Covering the violence of the revolution exposed Shepherd to “the politics of starvation,” Kathleen said. “What horrified him was that people that could have made a difference, like the leaders of our country or of Ethiopia, were just playing politics, and people were dying,” she added. “That would become a life theme.”

He pursued a later-in-life doctorate in African American studies at Boston University because “he wanted to know a lot of new stuff,” Kathleen said. It also gave him the opportunity to hone the old stuff. At 50, Shepherd completed a dissertation on the subject of starvation and war, the theme “that had caught his attention when he was 22,” she said.

He took teaching positions at Dartmouth, heading the college’s War & Peace Program and teaching in what became the Environmental Studies Department.

Karen Fisher-Vanden, an assistant professor at the time, was Shepherd’s office neighbor in the department. She was hustling to get tenure while also raising two young children.

“I was drawn to him from the very start, and I’m not sure I would have made it through that very stressful time of my life without him,” Fisher-Vanden said. “He was one of those people that felt like family. I felt like I could be vulnerable, or express my anxieties. And I knew that what I said would stay with him.”

She thinks a number of people, from students, to friends, to even Shepherd’s own mentors, turned to him for those same reasons.

“He really acted like you were special to him, and I don’t think he was making that up,” Fisher-Vanden said. “But, I mean, to feel that way about so many people. Some of us can only handle a certain number of people, but he seemed to be able to handle limitless.”

Shepherd returned to Africa, leading, along with Kathleen, nine Dartmouth undergraduate foreign studies groups across the continent. The couple also worked together when Shepherd was a coordinator of the Global Securities Fellows Initiative at Cambridge University in England.

The pair dined high-table style with activists and scholars from post-communist Eastern Europe or post-apartheid Southern Africa, and often traveled to their dining companions’ countries. “That was one of the most fun times of our lives,” Kathleen said.

But they always returned to Vermont, where they had set out to make a home for their children. His son, Caleb, ultimately moved in with his own family next door, and the elder Shepherds hosted their three granddaughters at their house each summer for “camp.”

“My parents have a romantic idea of leaving the city and getting back to the land in Vermont,” Caleb said. He remembers piling into an old Jeep with his father and sister when they were young. “We’d drive up the old hillside behind our house and he’d chainsaw trees. We’d bring them back down to the house and split them and stack them.”

Later in life, Shepherd got creative with his wood stacking, turning them into sculptures of fish and bears.

Despite a life spent reporting and researching some of the biggest questions of our time, “Jack was all about the little things,” Donohue, his former student, said. “He was about kindnesses, and seeing people, and laughing. He had a fabulous sense of humor.”

Frances Mize is a Report for America corps member. She can be reached at fmize@vnews.com or 603-727-3242.

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