Derek Updegraf Huntington – 50th Reunion Essay

Derek Updegraf Huntington

Date of Death: 19-Sep-2011

College: Pierson

(This memorial appeared in the New York Times.)

Derek Huntington, longtime Manhattan resident and former president of ZZZ Carpentry, died on September 19 in the West Village. At Yale he was a nationally ranked lacrosse player, a member of Fence Club, and Scroll & Key Senior Society. Music was always a vital part of Derek’s life. Throughout the 1970s he was a professional singer, songwriter, music producer, and sound engineer, living and performing in Los Angeles, Boston, and across New England. In 1980, Derek moved to Manhattan and, in 1982, he founded ZZZ Carpentry, a high-end residential construction firm, collaborating closely with a number of notable architects on both traditional and modern renovations. Derek was an avid fresh- and saltwater fly fisherman, an enthusiastic tennis player, and an all-around athlete. He was a summer resident of Saltaire on Fire Island. Derek had many friends whom he loved and who loved him. He is survived by his wife and partner of 21 years, Caroline Northcote Sidnam.

Excerpts from a funeral eulogy posted by Thomas Weber on the Class Website: Everyone here—plus many more who could not come—valued Derek Huntington, or loved him, for different reasons. In my case, I’d say, after thinking about him daily since last summer, that I loved him for something I’d sum up as heart.

We met at Yale. He was a singer and played the flute, wildly like Pan. He asked me to give him guitar lessons. Picture the two of us in my college room—Derek delving into the music, working out chords and struggling with picking patterns, serene, concentrated, screwing up, and laughing when he screwed up—that gust of laughter he had. He had not just the skill of an athlete but the heart of a competitive athlete. You don’t get All-American honors without that, and I was still to learn you don’t get much of any honors without that.

I made a 10-minute film starring Derek and no one else, a burlesque of Nanook of the North in which Derek’s Eskimo hunter way outdid Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin. I always wanted to direct “Waiting for Godot”, just so I could cast Derek as Lucky. He was so free, unlaced.

You liked to be with Derek. Yet that was only half: in his company, you liked yourself. You enjoyed yourself, literally, and you liked how he saw you.

We were both in Boston at the same time, and while I—once marked by friends and teachers as a creative writer—instead held an establishment job and in a fit of timidity went to Harvard Business School, Derek was starting and running Perfect Crime Productions, and writing beautiful songs. It was not easy for him to perform in public and to perform songs of personal feeling; but he did perform, with élan as well as bravery.

He offered help to a convicted murderer, an immigrant, who worked for him. This seemed to me not just bold but in fact the true charity many devout people fail to attain.

A week before the tumor cropped up, I got an email saying “It’s time for you and me to take a high-altitude fishing trip.” He meant trout casting up in the Rockies. It was not time. And never will be. Or it will be an extremely high-altitude fishing trip.

To say, “When Derek died a part of me died with him” is not sentimental, it’s factual. The part of you he brought out has died; the part of you he prized has gone away, and you will not see yourself in his eyes, anymore.