John Shippee Obituary

Jon Woolery '61 said:

John and I attended 8th Grade together before moving on to Menlo-Atherton High as freshmen and then to Woodside--which had just opened--for our final three of high school years. He was always at the top of our classes but, as can be expected, he wasn't a standout in PE though he always put in an effort. John early on had developed a socialist bent, which though occasionally unnerving to me--a staunch conservative--did not lessen my respect for the guy. Once in English class he cautioned a classmate who said Cuba's Fidel Castro was a dictator with the words "That's debatable." Dennis Hessian promptly added before I could "It's a fact." I still recall John early on distributing flyers opposing the then-future I-280 freeway. He was our class Valedictorian. After graduation we parted ways and the last I saw him was 5-6 years later when we bumped into each other at Roberts of Woodside (his mother and adoptive father still lived in town), to learn he was back from Switzerland where he had lived for a while. He looked and sounded great, though I didn't get a feel for how he perceived the rest of his life. Decades later I initiated an effort to locate John, about when the Class of '61 had a reunion. He didn't show and I 'heard' he had died, this later and indirectly from a classmate that she saw an indicator in the obituary of his mother (of father) that John had passed on earlier. He hasn't died yet, it turned out, but a short while later someone relayed to me John's obituary... he had died shortly after a follow-on reunion, in 2013. No cause of death was given. He had been living in Georgia, and--not surprisingly--it was noted that John true to form had visited Cuba once or twice. John, from Buck Woolery: Rest in peace.