W. Patrick C. Phear, Pioneering Mediator

W. Patrick C. Phear died of kidney cancer Feb. 16 at the age of 66. He was a scientist, a pioneering mediator, an artist, and a man of strong feelings, deep values, courage and humor.

Born in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, in 1940, Patrick grew up on a remote farm without electricity, where he learned to be resourceful and creative. He delighted in the natural world. After graduating from the University of Natal in South Africa, he worked for the Rhodesian Tsetse Department at Gonarazhou and Mana Pools as an entomologist. He built the first road at Mana, near the Zambezi River. Often the work done during the day was destroyed by irate elephants that night. When Ian Smith came into office, Patrick decided he did not want to raise a family in the increasingly racially segregated society, so with a wife and toddler, George, he emigrated, landing in Boston in 1965, where their son Hugh and daughter Nicolette were born.

His first job in the United States was caring for the lab rats at Children’s Hospital. Over the next 10 years, the job evolved into a teaching position at Harvard Medical School. He worked on smooth muscle as a physiologist in the department of anesthesiology.

He was divorced in 1974, and was so shocked and outraged to discover how poorly the needs of children were met by courts in divorce cases that he decided to change careers. His aim was to introduce alternate dispute resolution into divorce procedures, for which there was little precedent at the time. He had to develop programs from scratch, persuade courts to adopt them, and train mediators to implement them.

Over the next 25 years, he had a private practice as a mediator, trainer, and consultant. He founded the first civil court mediation program in Massachusetts. He developed and taught courses on conflict resolution, negotiation, and the design of dispute resolution programs to mid-career professionals and at several law schools. He was a consultant to state judicial systems including California, Connecticut, Florida, Massachusetts, New Mexico and North Carolina, as well as to many county courts and to the United States Appellate Court. He pioneered the use of mediation in resolving interstate parental kidnapping cases and developed the first state-wide court-sponsored mediation program to resolve child abuse and termination of parental rights cases in Connecticut.

He chaired the American Arbitration Association’s first committee on family mediation. He was a board member of the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts, and served on the association’s steering committee in their pioneering efforts to introduce ethical standards to the field of family mediation. Working with the Levinson Institute, he served as a mediator and as a consultant to the Social Security Administration and private organizations including Ford Motor Corporation, Owens Corning, the University of Kentucky Medical Center and Cambridge City Hospital. He trained the first group of mediators working on the Vineyard.

In 1976, he married Beatrice (Edey) Hicks, who had summered on the Island since childhood. After taking a course on building your own home, together with their five children they designed and built a vacation house in West Tisbury, and then created a lovely pond by the house. Patrick and Bea also made many trips back to Africa, partly to visit family (the disintegration of Zimbabwe under its abusive dictatorship was a constant source of distress) and also to explore. Their most notable camping trip, lasting six months, took place in 1990, when with three of their recently graduated children, they drove two small land rovers from Morocco to Zimbabwe. It was a trip rich in adventure, challenge, beauty, human interaction, occasional discomfort, and mysterious encounters with local officials and red tape. Such a journey would be impossible today, as parts of the route, such as Congo, are unsafe.

After his cancer was diagnosed in 2000, Bea and Patrick moved to West Tisbury full-time. A large group of family and friends around the world organized itself to visualize the shrinkage of Patrick’s tumors at a set time every day. He had always been a scientific and skeptical man, but he enjoyed and appreciated this project, which lasted over a year, and he felt that it may well have delayed the tumor growth, if only because of the overwhelming feeling it gave him of being loved and supported. He did survive years longer than initially predicted.

In recent years, Patrick served on the West Tisbury Conservation Commission, where his sharp mind and hard work were much appreciated. His love of roads continued. He volunteered to become road commissioner of the Obed Daggett Road Association and take care of it himself. He bought a little tractor and maintained the road in better condition than ever before.

His retirement also gave him time for art. He learned metal work and became an avid sculptor, with a smithy behind the house and a studio off-Island. He had always been a prolific doodler; his doodles were geometrical forms integrating both angles and curves, implying infinities with spirals. Among his major works is a huge metal doodle hanging in the front hall of the house.

In addition to his wife and children, survivors include his stepchildren, Catherine Hicks and David Hicks; his mother, Margaret Tredgold; his sister and brother-in-law, Shirley and John Clatworthy; his brother and sister-in-law Stephen and Stephanie Phear; and many nieces and nephews.

A memorial service will be held at 2:30 p.m. Saturday, March 3rd at the First Congregational Church of West Tisbury. In lieu of flowers, contributions in Patrick’s memory may be made to The Vineyard Energy Project.