Bill Dietel – catalyst, mentor, model – leaves a rich legacy

Bill Dietel lived in the ripple effects he helped create. 

As an educator, he sent thousands of young people into the world more convinced of their own capacities to live a fruitful life. As a philanthropist, he helped convert bank accounts into services and programs that made life better, at least for somebody. As a supporter of nonprofit organizations, he nudged fragile, well-meaning groups to mature, deliver something of value and convince generous friends to help them do it.

On Oct. 10, Dietel, at 96, died in his home at Over Jordan Farm in Flint Hill, and stories and impressions erupted across Rappahannock County, forming a portrait  of a man who was a walking multiplier effect — less a structure than an energy source, less a noun than a verb. 

One example captures the pattern: In the spring of 2021, Rappahannock’s 7,100-acre Eldon Farms — a unique ecological asset — had languished for two years under a for-sale sign, with no committed buyer on the horizon. Dietel — ever the catalyst and matchmaker — approached Chuck Akre, who recalled Dietel’s cut-to-the-chase style: “You have to buy it.” Akre, who was stepping back from management responsibilities at the wildly successful Akre Capital Management, recalled his own reaction to Dietel’s idea: “You’re crazy.” 

But on June 30 that year, the Akre family bought the vast agglomeration of farms and woodlands for an undisclosed price understood to be more than $50 million. Eldon Farms was secured from unwelcome development and partition, and Akre was launched on an unforeseen venture in conservation. “The reason we’re in Eldon is Bill,” Akre said. 

Then there is Pete Smith, who met and instantly befriended Dietel about five years ago. Smith, formerly the chief executive of Watson Wyatt Worldwide, a global human resources consulting firm, found retirement uncompelling and launched SmithPilot, Inc., which advises schools and nonprofit organizations. Dietel connected to Smith’s work, but also to Smith himself, and he began to worry that his friend, approaching his late 70s, was having trouble letting go of his demanding work schedule.

Smith recalled Dietel asking, “Are you ever going to stop? What do you like doing that isn’t work?” Smith pointed to his interest in photography, but time passed, and the intense worklife persisted. Then Dietel proposed a project: Smith would prepare a year of photographic images at the Dietel family’s beloved Over Jordan Farm. “It took more and more of my time, and I really enjoyed it,” Smith said. “At the end of 2022, I really cut the cord, doing virtually no client work after that date — in other words finally, really retiring.” As for Dietel’s role in the transition, Smith said, “He did it.”

The education catalyst

Long before becoming a catalyst, Dietel discovered one in the power of education. In Rappahannock, he argued passionately for budgeting for the best education the Rappahannock County school system could deliver. Linda Dietel, his wife of 68 years, played a critical role in creating the Child Care and Learning Center and Headwaters Foundation, one of the first public education foundations in Virginia, serving as its first board chair. 

Dietel grew up in the small-town slow lane of Churchville, N.Y. His father, son of a German immigrant, had a Depression-era medical practice, at times accepting food in lieu of payment from struggling patients. Dietel’s formidable mother, whose father had immigrated from Italy, grasped the power of education and scrimped to send both Dietel and his younger brother, Jack, to Phillips Exeter Academy, followed by Princeton University. Bill went on to Yale University, earning a doctorate in English History, which took him to London, where he established a lifelong passion for almost everything British.

As Dietel remembered it, Phillips Exeter reset the trajectory. In a memoir he composed for his 11 grandchildren and six great grandchildren, he wrote, “In that period, doors opened for me into worlds I never suspected existed. I heard of people and places, of ideas and events, of human achievement utterly new in my experience.” 

Elite schools famously establish and reinforce networks, along with imparting knowledge. But more fundamentally, Dietel’s Exeter experience gave birth to a worldview that British author and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips described in his book, “Going Sane”: “It is sane to believe in, and live as if there are, good things and good people who can help us live our lives.” 

For Dietel, that basic premise generated experiences that in turn gave him more confidence that doors could open and that he could walk through them. As Dietel tells it, in his last year at Princeton, he met “the girl of my dreams,” the 16-year-old Linda Lyon Remington, headed for a Wellesley College education from a well-established Rochester family. A courtship followed, and four years later the two found themselves planning a life together. “Life was very good and the gods smiled on us,” Dietel wrote in the family memoir. 

In 1961, after teaching at the University of Massachusetts and Amherst College, Dietel became headmaster at the Emma Willard School in Troy, N.Y., America’s oldest preparatory school for girls, and Linda’s alma mater. In 1970, he moved to the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, becoming president in 1975, a role he held through 1987. Learning of Dietel’s death, the foundation issued an appreciation: “Few people outside the Rockefeller family have made an impact on the RBF as profound as Bill Dietel.”

Linda Dietel finds Rappahannock

Life with the Rockefeller Foundation involved long hours, dinners and galas in New York. The Dietels’ eldest daughter Betsy, a Rappahannock resident, remembered that her mother “didn’t like the hoopla of Manhattan,” preferring sheep-raising at a farm the family owned in Richfield, Conn.

When Bill stepped down as president of the foundation in 1987, the Dietels began to explore their next chapter. A contact made through Colonial Williamsburg, one of dozens of organizations where Bill was a board member, led to an exploration of Rappahannock County, noted for its beauty and its aversion to haphazard development. A local banker owned a scenic parcel between Washington and Flint Hill, empty except for a lone shed which turned out to contain a log cabin. Linda sensed this would be their home, and Bill was willing to trust her intuition. The Dietels bought the land, eventually transforming it into today’s Over Jordan Farm.

The farm’s name is descriptive – the property is reached by crossing a small river named Jordan – but also symbolic, connecting with multiple Biblical references to a land of promise just beyond the river that borders the modern state of Israel. Though the Dietels weren’t explicitly religious, the Remingtons were active Presbyterians, and Betsy Dietel figures that growing up, her mother would have sung a popular hymn that carries a refrain, “Over Jordan, Over Jordan, Yes, we’ll rest our weary feet.” 

While Bill continued to advise friends and clients on philanthropic ventures, Linda built a presence in Rappahannock County, with education emerging as the cornerstone interest. In addition to jump-starting the Child Care and Learning Center and Headwaters, she served on the advisory board for Lord Fairfax Community College, now the Laurel Ridge Community College. She also initiated the rehabilitation of the Scrabble School as a senior center.

Jane Bowling-Wilson, executive director of the Northern Piedmont Community Foundation, and before that, the director of the Headwaters Foundation, considers Linda and Bill Dietel the ideal mentors. Linda guided her in her early days at Headwaters, she said, while “Bill was always available, always accessible,” ever convinced that good ideas could be funded. “He’d say, ‘Go find the money. All you have to do is ask.’”

Virtually all of Rappahannock’s nonprofit organizations have at some point drawn on Bill Dietel’s mentoring prowess. “He wasn’t an outlier; he was an out-performer,”  said John McCarthy, formerly Rappahannock’s longtime administrator and currently senior adviser and director of strategic partnerships at the Piedmont Environmental Council. He added: “It’s no tragedy to die in your 10th decade on the planet. It’s still an enormous loss.”

In 2007, Dietel, with his oldest and youngest daughters, created Dietel and Partners, a firm that continues to advise families who understand philanthropy as means for addressing societal problems that elude simple solutions.

In most communities, outsiders energetically advancing new ideas stir resistance as well as admiration. In Rappahannock, no exception: yard signs extend a welcome to newcomers, while suggesting they clear out if they push too many ideas from their earlier lives. Dietel didn’t take the jabs personally, and continued to push for causes, like quality education, that he believed would benefit the children of residents who tended to criticize his efforts. 

Concerned about polarized attitudes in the community, he helped spearhead the nonpartisan, nonprofit Foothills Forum, which early on carried out a countywide survey about local issues and priorities. For the past decade, Foothills has worked in partnership with the Rappahannock News to expand award-winning coverage of local issues through community support. 

The School of Aging Well

Bill Dietel’s last educational project was an unannounced school on aging well. Dietel men – including Bill’s father and brother – have died young, leaving Bill to trailblaze his way into his 90s as a widower. Dietel accepted the familiar catalog of old-age losses, always returning to the optimist’s assertion of “nonetheless” – the farewells and fragilities pile up, but nonetheless, air gets breathed, paths get walked, friendships are made and renewed. 

Though people in their mid-90s are often considered too old for new love or overseas travel, Dietel’s last two years were brightened by both. Dietel didn’t believe in accepting limitations unnecessarily. 

At 95, Dietel surprised Cliff Miller III with a proposal to walk a 2.5 mile trail that looped around Turkey Mountain on Miller’s Mount Vernon Farm. Though Miller doubted the wisdom of the outing, he got a surprise. “Damn if he didn’t walk the whole thing!” Miller said. 

Miller then told Dietel of another recently cut trail they might walk in the future.  “What about tomorrow?” Dietel shot back, underscoring another old-age maxim: Don’t delay. The second hike occurred the next day. “I’m going to miss the heck out of him,” Miller confessed.  

Taking a group to Saranac Lake where Linda Dietel’s family had acquired a large Adirondack camp, Dietel asked his guests whether they were optimistic about America’s future. Listing the litany of familiar woes ranging from blood-sport politics to climate chaos, the guests were broadly gloomy. Not Dietel, who went on to cite the country’s emergence from Jim Crow segregation, vastly expanded opportunities for women, and advances in cancer treatments.

Clear about the risks associated with late-life isolation, Dietel formed The Sherry Assembly, with regular afternoon gatherings of three men and three women who live alone. “It was always an occasion,” said Clare Turner, the widowed owner of Virginia Chutney. “Bill was the leader; he even made badges.”

Dietel may have sensed a slowdown in recent months. He raised the prospect of moving to a senior residence that could provide more care over time. Dietel entered swift decline just after his daughter and son-in-law returned from a trip to the Republic of Georgia. Two days later, he went to bed at his cottage on Over Jordan Farm for the last time. 

In dying, he delivered the community an uncharacteristic smack of grief. But one after another, his saddened friends have found themselves reliving a humorous episode or recapturing a gem of sage advice. It seems that Bill Dietel is still making people smile. 

For his part, Dietel didn’t sidestep the reality of dying one day. Living down the hill from his eldest daughter Betsy and her husband Mike Sands, he joined them for dinner every night, often closing with an instruction: “Just remember: If I’m not here tomorrow, don’t be sad. It’s been a great life.”

Editor’s note: There have been various prices linked to the purchase of the 7,100-acre Eldon Farms by Rappahannock resident Chuck Akre in 2021. County court records show a closing price of $27.6 million. The seller had sought $75 million when it was put up for sale two years earlier. 

Foothills Forum is an independent, community-supported nonprofit tackling the need for in-depth research and reporting on Rappahannock County issues.

The group has an agreement with Rappahannock Media, owner of the Rappahannock News, to present this series and other award-winning reporting projects. More at foothillsforum.org.