Quentin Anthony Lawson, October 7, 2020
Quentin Lawson died peacefully at his home in Washington, DC on October 7, 2020 of end-stage heart failure after a long and valiant battle with hereditary amyloidosis.
Quent came to Yale from Detroit and wound up in Vanderbilt, one floor above me. We bonded over the Doodle, the surgical tubing slingshot, and road trips, among other things. And we remained close friends for 55 years. We were hallmates in the Morse tower our senior year and—with the exception of a bit of time after graduation while Quent was working in New York and then at Michigan Law—we lived within a few minutes of each other at various spots in DC since the mid ‘70s. We spoke frequently, shared innumerable meals, and traveled together regularly with a group of other classmates, including, at various times, Larry Franks, Don Galligan, Dave Stretch, and Pat Madden. And for decades Quent was a constant presence at our annual Harvard weekend reunion in New York.
Quent was such a regular part of my life for so long that it’s hard to imagine a day without him in it. There was simply no better friend.
After law school, Quent spent his entire career working as an attorney at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, handling mostly hydroelectric issues. He enjoyed the work but was ready to retire, which he did in 2013.
Quent had a truly generous spirit to go along with a consistently sweet disposition. He was a marvelous storyteller and had a wonderful, dry sense of humor. As Robb High once said, Quent “could make a stone laugh.” Those of us clueless social science majors who stumbled through astronomy junior year recall Quent’s hopeless stab at an exam question that asked the class to calculate the luminosity of the sun if it were 30 million miles closer to earth. Quent’s blue book answer: “It would be so bright that everyone would have to wear shades.” I think the professor gave him a two on a 60-point question for at least being original. Quent’s holiday card a couple of years ago had him–not a small guy by any means–on a camel in Jordan. Neither Quent nor the camel looked happy.
Quent’s interests were varied. He was a voracious consumer of music, beginning with a stint at WYBC, where, as Franks put it, “he viewed his mission as at least partly to champion jazz and ‘cool’ selections at a time when many of us were off on psychedelic or other tangents.” He loved cinema and he seemed to have seen—and remembered—every movie ever filmed. When we traveled, it wasn’t unusual to find Quent in the middle of the night engrossed in some obscure foreign horror flick while everyone else in the house slept. Before there was tech, Quent was already studying and acquiring the newest devices. He took me to buy my first cell phone and patiently taught me (to the extent I could absorb it) how to use it.
Quent was also a dedicated rugby player–a sport he began at Yale–and for many years he played for the storied Sudamericano de Rugby. Later he played for the Potomac Athletic Club where he was captain and then president. Incredibly, his career only ended when he was in his early 40s. It always struck me as out of character that someone with such an unfailingly gentle manner was so taken with rugby but Quent loved it.
In 2000, Quent married Ellen Quinn, a delightful Peace Corps veteran, the love of his life, and very much his perfect mate and traveling companion. He was more than content to have Ellen arrange their travels, with or without the camel.
Quent was overjoyed to have made it to our 50th and to have seen so many of his old and treasured friends. He reveled in reminiscing about the antics of our college years and reconnecting five decades later. Watching him, I realized that whatever the future holds for the rest of us, it won’t be as full of warmth and laughter as our lives were with him in it.
Larry Franks recalls: I worked in a Capitol Hill office near Quent’s for a few years as the 21st century dawned, and we would meet for lunch to chat and reminisce. My day was always a better one after sharing his good cheer. Quent’s sense of humor was sly and dry. He was an accomplished raconteur, but his forte was the quip. It usually took the form of an off-the-cuff observation that, as it sank in, produced a delayed reaction in the listener sort of like a depth charge hitting the water, then exploding loudly after a few moments.
Dave Stretch remembers “Q’s” wedding: Quentin, who we always called “Q,” surprised us all when we went to his wedding to Ellen in DC 20 years ago. Q’s whole family was there from Detroit, and none of them recognized who we were talking about when we mentioned “Q.” His family had always called him Anthony, his middle name, which confused most of us. Q decided, when he came to Yale to use his first name, Quentin. Simple enough, but it always made me think that there was far more to Q than we knew. He was quiet, subtle, understated, terse, but always insightful and terrifically funny. I looked forward to seeing Q at our annual gatherings of Morse classmates on the Chesapeake Bay, in Maine, or New York, and once in Portugal, and regret that I usually lived many thousands of miles from DC and could not meet with Q, and all the others, more frequently. Q and Ellen were the perfect pair, and it was a joy to see them together. I will miss Q. He enriched the lives of all who knew him.