Here is the text of the profile of Howard Quirk written to accompany his induction into the Frost Valley Hall of Fame yesterday:
He was a minister and a counselor; a raconteur and an
entertainer; a story-teller and witty tour guide. Above all else, Howard E.
Quirk (1924-1994) was passionate about people – the people whose futures he
brightened as long-time executive director of The Victoria Foundation of
Newark, New Jersey; the people whose eyes he opened during his famous “vertical
tours” of St. John the Divine Cathedral; the people whose lives were touched by
his association with Frost Valley. In the five years before his death in 1994,
Howard had become, as Halbe Brown once put it, “the heartbeat of Frost Valley.”
He worked full-time as a volunteer at Frost Valley’s office in Montclair. He
directed our Endowment Fund, and served as liaison with the Tokyo-Frost Valley
YMCA Partnership Program.
Before volunteering at Frost Valley, Howard had led the
Victoria Foundation from 1968 to 1989. “In the world of foundation
grant-making,” he once wrote, “there is no direct correlation between effort
and success.” Still, he contended, we must try – and make the supreme effort. And
try hard he did. By the time Howard retired
from the foundation, Victoria was awarding $10 million in grants each year.
Howard’s leadership enabled the Foundation to sponsor projects such as
Tri-City, North Ward Education & Cultural Center, Kids Corporation, Unified
Vailsburg and PCCI (Protestant Community Center Inc.) – several of these programs
quite familiar to Frost Valley people because through them, with Howard’s and
his staff’s tireless help, we brought to summer camp children whose families
could not afford the tuition but who desperately needed time away from the
city. In a reflective note describing
one grant request asking Victoria to fund support for victims of child abuse,
Howard mused: “What is being done to explore and alter the forces that
dehumanize society? Foundations are not under the same pressures as government
to produce instant results. Why not, then, take advantage of this extraordinary
latitude and invest time and substance in looking beyond and beneath the usual?
We should be addressing all-encompassing issues.”
Howard Quirk passed away in October 1994, just as his Frost
Valley voluntarism was really getting underway. His successor at Victoria was
Cathy McFarland Harvey, now herself a long-time Frost Valley trustee. “Finding
and hiring Cathy in 1971,” Howard once wrote, “and recommending her promotion
in 1974 may well turn out to be my greatest single move with Victoria.” Though
his death was untimely, Howard was able to make certain that his legacy and
impact here would be strong and continuous, through his talented successors at
the Foundation; through the very idea of high-level voluntarism at Frost Valley
(which he inaugurated); through the extraordinary success of our various urban
partnerships, enabling kids who would hardly otherwise have a chance to come to
these mountains, to grow and to make friends; through his memorialization in
1998, in the naming of Quirk Lodge and of its main meeting room, Victoria Hall;
and, now, through the honoring of the late Howard E. Quirk, a generous and
much-beloved man, with induction into the Frost Valley Hall of Fame.
