Lockhart, Kenneth (4/5/2022)

Dan Klein, Steve Clagett and Tim Means teamed up to create an obituary for our beloved former classmate, Kenneth Craig Lockhart:

Ken was born in Honolulu and was raised in Colorado and Wyoming. He graduated from Cherry Creek High School in the Denver suburbs and matriculated at Dartmouth in September 1965. He was an avid skier, an English major, a Little Hall resident and devoted Tabard Brother, who loved art, poetry, and music. He especially loved to dance, all his life.

Ken lived an unconventional life, a life rich in emotional intensity and personal adventure, great generosity and yet economic poverty. After he graduated from Dartmouth in 1970, he received his law degree from Hastings in San Francisco, and is believed to have practiced law there for at least a few years, though it seemed his heart was not in it. For some number of years he was a clerk-typist for the city of San Francisco and, in a job he enjoyed more than practicing law, he drove a municipal bus and was renowned for leading his passengers in Christmas carols during the season. Certainly his nature was the antithesis of the adversarial system on which so much of law practice is based. He was, as they say, a lover not a fighter.

Ken lived for many decades prior to his death in the same apartment he and his partner Bill shared in San Francisco’s Mission District. Bill's untimely death several years ago was difficult for Ken.

He was a master bridge player and for years an active member of the city's bridge community. Ken was well known and loved in the neighborhood, especially in the bar at The Liberties, a restaurant where he could be found taking his meals and nursing a Guinness many hours every day during his final years. The bar staff treasured and looked after him, and four of them joined his fraternity brothers in a Zoom call to memorialize him shortly after his death on April 5, 2022, after battling a series of heart-related health problems. He delighted in pushing the boundaries of human experience and his body had suffered the consequences.

Ken opened the minds and touched the souls of many people. At his memorial Zoom gathering, we remembered him in part for the music he eagerly introduced us to, from his rock-and-roll 45’s that he put into the Tabard jukebox to Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, which some of us cannot hear without fondly remembering him. On that call, we listened to Judy Collins’s version of Dylan’s classic Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues and Judy Garland’s Somewhere Over the Rainbow. He is profoundly missed.