Memorial Minute: John Joseph Kane

Instructor in English; Rupert Radford 1915 Faculty Fellowship (1939-2023)

John Joseph Kane was born in the Bronx on March 24, 1939. He graduated from the prestigious Regis High School on the Upper East Side—just across town but worlds away, he recalled—going on to receive his A.B. at Fordham University and his M.A. at Johns Hopkins University; later, he pursued doctoral work in English Literature at the University of Virginia. He taught English at Loyola High School in New York City and at Dartmouth College before coming to Phillips Exeter Academy in 1973, where he was appointed instructor in the English Department, joining that legendary generation of Harkness teachers, also recently or soon-to-be appointed, that included Charlie Pratt, Peter Greer, Harvard Knowles, Charlie Terry, Mike Drummey, Fred Tremallo, Dolores Kendrick and David Weber.

John and his family—his wife, Mary Ann, and their two sons, Justin and Owen—lived in Dunbar Hall from 1973 to 1985, where John served as dorm head, and then in Veazey House. Eric Burgofsky, who worked with John and lived above him in Dunbar from when he was first assigned to be dorm head in 1978, relates this memory as an illustration of “just how unflappable and even-keeled” John was, ideal qualities for a dorm head of sixty-three boys known for occasionally challenging behavior. Eric recalls:

This anecdote involves a young faculty member living above John on the second floor of Dunbar Hall in the year 1978-79. He will remain nameless, but his initials are E.B. and he is still on the faculty. It was a sweltering hot night in late spring when E.B. returned late at night to an apartment that seemed 100 degrees. Against the advice of his wife, E.B. decided to go into the basement and haul a rather large and heavy air conditioner up to the second-floor master bedroom for relief from the heat. The destined window happened to be directly above the patio of John’s first-floor apartment. There was a slight slip-up in the installation process that resulted in the air conditioner falling out the window and crashing onto John’s patio with a huge sound of impact. Being midnight or later, all was dark and quiet in John’s apartment until E.B. noticed a light go on and the door to the patio opening with John emerging in his pajamas. Leaning out the second-floor window, E.B. said to John, “Sorry, but my air conditioner fell from my window.” John looked down at the now critically injured hunk of steel on his patio and then looked back up and said without expression, “That’s OK,” then returned inside. In the following days, weeks, and in all the years they were colleagues, John never spoke to E.B. about it again.

Outside the dorm, John was involved with many faculty committees and extracurricular work including Admissions, Financial Aid, the Bennett Fellowship Selection Committee, Director of Poetry Stage, Infinity Thespians, the Merrill Speaking Prize and the Thompson Planning Committee, which recommended (under John’s envisioning) spacious quarters for day students in the new Academy Center. He was adviser to the Korean Society and WPEA, was a track official and led Drama Sports, and he coached Tai Chi, having first taught himself from a book. John also helped to establish the first Asian Student Society. In 2001-2002, he and Mary Ann spent a year abroad in Zaragosa, Spain, with SYA.

John served as Interim Director of the College Placement Office from 1981 to 1982 and was Associate Dean of Students from 1978 to 1979. He served on the task force that worked on the Academy’s Master Plan to strengthen the residential curriculum for all of its students, particularly day students. For this work, he was awarded a Rupert Radford ’15 Faculty Fellowship. In her citation, Principal Kendra Stearns O’Donnell said to John, “You are . . . the best kind of ‘yes man’. We are grateful for your skill, energy and good humor in tackling the many significant jobs you have said ‘yes’ to. We are particularly grateful for your years of ‘distinguished and faithful service’ as Day Student Coordinator, a role in which you have served the Academy by your masterful management of the Academy-based residential life of an important segment of our student and family population.”

“One man in his time plays many parts,” wrote Shakespeare, and alongside those of husband, father, teacher, adviser, administrator, John graced the stage of Fisher Theater in a number of student productions over the years, playing the parts of Polonius, Cyrano, Banquo, the Lord High Executioner, Judge Danforth in The Crucible, but perhaps most memorably, the Narrator/Stage Manager of Our Town. Of John’s performance in that production, Rob Richards wrote that though Paul Newman had played the part in a professional production, “he never drew me in the way John Kane” did. Rob recalls, “Watching John act . . . his mentoring and friendship . . . they are immeasurable gifts. [He was] a built-in dramaturg, and a superb model for the students. He came to rehearsal with his lines memorized! Ready to work. Ready to share such line deliveries. Forever my favorite actor, my own star. What a gift to a teaching career!”

Colleagues remember John as “small in frame, but a giant in intellect.” He was known for quietly, soberly clarifying issues and introducing new perspectives from his seat in the smoking section of faculty meeting, as well as for his kind and warm-hearted support of colleagues in the English Department. One testified that John was “a multi-talented individual who did not broadcast his gifts yet shared them freely. Non sibi was in his DNA.” Fellow colleagues and friends also appreciated and admired the astute—and deadpan hilarious—ways he “viewed and commented on the human comedy.” [from John’s obituary]

In a career review, John wrote, “Friends keep asking me when will I have my mid-life crisis. I’d have it in a minute if it would please you, but I can’t at the moment think of another kind of work I’d be more satisfied with.” Of course, that work was bound up in the teaching of English, work that John described as “teaching language . . . ways language can help discover, define, shape perceptions, thoughts, feelings, imaginings,” work that he hoped would “make students alive, eager and zestful . . . blithe for learning, as Sir Thomas More might have said.” [from John’s 25 Year Citation, written by Dean of Faculty Jack Herney]

His students fondly remembered Mr. Kane as a “man of good cheer, well known for his easygoing and approachable nature.” He was a “strong believer in the Harkness method, striving to foster a positive learning environment in the classroom and aiming to help his students cultivate a genuine interest in the English language.” He “never ceased to bring color into the classroom,” according to one, “even as we struggled to plow through Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.”

One colleague in the English Department [T.H.] recalls sharing a classroom with Mr.Kane during his first year of teaching at Exeter. “I was impressed,” he wrote, “by the handmade cushions adorning each chair around the Harkness table (Mary Ann’s embellishment, as I later learned). All for nought, John later told me; when entering the classroom on the first day and finding their comfortably padded seats, the Exeter boys—and they were mostly boys then—stood each cushion on its end, preferring the hard wooden slab for their proper instruction. ‘Discomfort builds character’—in the old Exeter ethos. But it stayed with me,” continued the colleague, “John’s gesture, as emblematic of his kindness and warmth in a place that was rarely kind or warm, back then.”

Those qualities were echoed by one of John’s students who was a member of Exeter’s first female class [Jane Feldman]. She writes:

He was a gift to his students, colleagues, and the school. In an era when there didn’t seem to be a lot of empathy or compassion towards the students from the faculty, he was an exception. I wrote a short story in which there was pain and suffering, and he asked me if I was okay. To compare, a dormmate wrote a story about a rape (which was based on a true story), and her English teacher corrected her grammar. Mr. Kane was a great teacher and a very kind man. I always made a point of visiting his classroom when I was back on campus.

There are surely countless more stories such as this one circulating in the minds and memories of the students who sat with Mr. Kane around the table during his thirty-nine years at Exeter, up until his retirement in 2012.

While PEA certainly kept John busy, he remained active in the greater Seacoast community and arts scene. He won the NHCTA Actor of the Year Award in 1985 for his work with The Exeter Players and several theater groups in Portsmouth. Also in Portsmouth, he served on the board of Prescott Park and did extensive volunteer work with The Independence Museum in Exeter. He performed several musicals with The Exeter Players and sang for a time with the choir at St. Michael’s Church. He led the Shakespeare Society in Exeter, with participants reading through nearly all of Shakespeare’s plays under John’s leadership.

John’s final curtain came after a protracted illness; he died peacefully on December 26, 2023. He is survived by Mary Ann, his beloved wife of fifty-nine years; his sons, Justin and Owen; daughters-in-law Lee Ann and Hester; grandchildren Phelan and Isabelle; and stepchild Tig. Perhaps it is appropriate to end this memorial with their tribute to “Grampy,” a “quietly spiritual and faithful” man who was “hilariously funny” but who also “had more gravitas in his little finger than most people have in their entire body . . . He was content to be himself, to be in our company, to make us laugh, to share his knowledge . . . to love each of us as we were, and to make his small slice of the world a much, much better place. He was not a perfect human, but he was perfect for us, and we were lucky to have him.”

Those sentiments are certainly shared by his extended family, us.

I move that this Memorial Minute be submitted to John’s wife, Mary Ann, and be spread upon the minutes of the faculty.

Respectfully submitted,

Todd Hearon