Charles Everts Love Jr. died peacefully on September 9, 2026, at the Arbors at Shelburne, Vt., surrounded by his loving family. He was one month shy of his 86th birthday.
Although Charlie only moved to Vermont in 2003, his direct ancestor John Evarts was deputed in 1761 by a group of men in Salisbury, Conn., to go to uncharted territory in New Hampshire (now Vermont) to make exact surveys in order to obtain charters for two new townships. Finding there was sufficient land in the tract, he laid out three towns, calling them New Haven, Middlebury and Salisbury, named from his own state. He himself never lived on this tract, but he had sons who did. He is named in local historical accounts as the person obtaining the charters for these three towns in 1762.
Charlie was born October 9, 1940, in Binghamton, N.Y., where his father was head of the IBM sales school. After several moves, they settled in Rochester, N.Y., where he graduated from Brighton High School in 1958.
A quiet, reserved person in high school, he blossomed at Hobart College in Geneva, N.Y., where he was junior Phi Beta Kappa and graduated summa cum laude with highest honors in philosophy. He started several campus organizations and was a Druid and the editor of the college newspaper, the Herald. He also engineered the merger of the Hobart and William Smith yearbooks and was coeditor.
He did graduate work in philosophy at Princeton University with a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. He later taught there and then went to Antioch College on a Danforth Fellowship that paid half his salary so he could investigate new modes of teaching. In addition to traditional philosophy courses, he also co-taught courses with professors in several disciplines, many including multimedia presentations or staged performances.
In 1973, he was invited to return to his alma mater to become dean of Hobart College, a unique position that included oversight over both campus life and academic progress. He assembled a dean’s committee of several faculty and a student to advise him on decisions that often involved asking a student to leave for a year or permanently. He was also a member of the president’s cabinet which, among other things, made the ultimate decision on faculty tenure. When he left Hobart in 1982, the yearbook devoted an entire page to him, saying: “Charles Love is a fair, gentle man whose dealings with us as human beings have made Hobart a warm place to be part of. Hail and Farewell, Dean Love, your departure leaves an emptiness here that may never be filled.”
Charlie and his wife, Wendy, and their two sons, moved to Ithaca, N.Y., in 1982, where Charlie pursued new opportunities. He formed a relationship with the Philosophy of Education Department at Cornell, where he took some graduate courses, taught some courses and published several articles in the field.
A lifelong Boy Scout, he held every single position as an adult volunteer in the Baden Powell Council: He started a one-day training program for commissioners that included councils from most of upstate New York and lasted for over 25 years; he chaired a national committee revising Cub Scout leadership materials; he was invited several times to teach adult training programs at Philmont Ranch in New Mexico; he was staff on the national pilot course revising “ Wood Badge,” an elite adult leadership training program. He led the Baden-Powell Council to be the first in the nation to challenge the anti-gay scout/leader policy of the national organization.
While in Ithaca, he also revived his love of photography that he had developed in Yellow Springs, Ohio, as a teaching aid. He was invited to participate in several regional galleries and won several regional and national prizes for his landscape and abstract photographs. He was an early member of the State of the Art Gallery in Ithaca, where, for many years, he organized a national juried photography show.
He also served for many years on the Advisory Board of the Lehman Alternative Community School and on the Committee on the Ministry at the Unitarian Church of Ithaca.
In 2003 he gave up all of his activities in Ithaca to follow his wife to Vermont, where she was hired as the executive director of the Vermont Commission on Women. Soon after their arrival he was elected to the board of the BSA Green Mountain Council of Vermont and then was elected president of the Council from 2004 to 2008. He led the Council to approve the admission of girls to scouting. He chaired the Distinguished Citizen Dinner honoring Bernie Sanders.
He did not pursue his photography in Vermont, partly because he preferred the sharp contrasts found in cibachrome printing, a process that had been recently discontinued, but also because he was not inspired by the Vermont landscape, which he described as “one pretty postcard after another.” He was asked to join the board of the newly incorporate Bryan Memorial Art Gallery in Jeffersonville, Vt. He was quickly elected president and led a successful capital campaign to create an administrative space at the Bryan.
Charlie had a lifelong love of music. He was all-state at NYSSMA his senior year of high school as a percussionist and played in the orchestra at Hobart as well as the ROTC marching band. He was a self-taught, avid Appalachian-style autoharp player and maintained a friendship over many years with George Orthey, a leading autoharp builder. During his later years he spent many hours playing his autoharp and listening to music of all kinds. One of his favorite things for the last two years of his life was attending Thursday night jazz at the 126 in downtown Burlington. Despite his advanced dementia, he routinely toured the room urging patrons to support jazz at the 126.
He is predeceased by his parents, Charles Everts Love and Louise C. Cornman, and his brother, David Farnsworth Love. He is survived by his devoted wife of 62 years, Wendy Anne Snow Love, of Essex Junction, Vt.; son Andrew E. Love and daughter-in-law Jessica Love of Salt Lake City, Utah; son David W. Love and daughter-in-Law Esther Acosta of New Haven, Conn.; and his beloved grandchild, RZ Love, of Salt Lake City.
A celebration of his life will be held next summer in Hector, N.Y., where his ancestors first settled in 1796 and where his ashes will be interred in an old family cemetery dating from that era.