The Rev. Robert W. Wilden, BD '61, Remembered as Generous Philanthropist and Friend
by Barbara Sutton
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From left, The Rev. Robert W. Wilden, |
Even a person who has already dedicated close to five decades of his life to service for the socially disadvantaged can experience a profound moment of vocational clarity, an epiphany in regard to destiny. For the late Rev. Robert W. Wilden, BD '61, that moment arrived after the death of his beloved wife of many years, Imogene, in 2005, when he undertook a search to find ways to contribute his financial resources, his time, and his talents for the good of his local community as well as Harvard Divinity School.
Wilden, who died on May 6 at the age of 72 after a struggle with pancreatic cancer, spent the last four years of his life avidly transcending the everyday. His search for needy beneficiaries of his personal philanthropy led him no farther than his own Falls Church, Virginia, and the nearby Washington, D.C., area, where he helped to develop affordable housing options and established an after-school computer training program for disadvantaged youths. He feared that Falls Church was transforming itself into essentially a "gated community" that would quickly become out of reach for the area's socioeconomically disadvantaged families.
The selfless, large-hearted propulsion behind Wilden's search may perhaps be best understood in the language of Walker Percy's acclaimed novel The Moviegoer, published the same year that Wilden received his bachelor of divinity degree from HDS: "The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life."
At the same time that Wilden was working at the grassroots level to make viable the affordable housing project for which his $500,000 gift provided seed money, he also made a generous $1.5 million commitment to the Divinity School to establish a fund in his late wife's memory that would support a professor of the practice in religious ethics. A member of both the HDS Leadership Council and the Committee on University Resources since 2007, Wilden named this fund in honor of his classmate Charles G. Adams, BD '64, the William and Lucille Nickerson Professor of the Practice of Ethics and Ministry at HDS.
Many of those in the bachelor of divinity program when Wilden, a native Californian, was a student remained close for life, as attested by his enduring friendship not only with Adams but also with Ralph Potter, Jr., Professor of Social Ethics Emeritus at HDS. The two men drove cross-country together in 1958 when Wilden was entering the BD program and Potter was starting his doctoral studies.
Joel W. Tibbetts, another classmate of Wilden's and Potter's, fondly recalls that after graduation, as an ordained Presbyterian minister, "Bob set out to improve the world, quietly, without flash or glamour or self-promotion. He worked with teenagers in Cambridge. He served two churches in St. Louis, where his car was stolen three times in a two-week period. Sitting in his office when it was stolen for the final time, he received a call from the St. Louis police informing him they had found his car. 'No,' he said. 'It's still parked outside the church.' But it wasn't."
The many social injustices brought to light by civil rights activism prompted Wilden's focused interest on efforts to help provide affordable housing. He worked for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for 17 years and then as executive director of the National Commission on Manufactured Housing until his retirement in 1994.
According to Dean William A. Graham, "Anyone who met Bob Wilden and heard him talk about his passion for justice or knew of his lifelong work to make things better for other Americans, especially those less able to make things better themselves, came away feeling they had been in touch with a special human being."
Tibbetts saw this remarkable quality in his longtime friend's strength in the face of his own illness and that of his wife. "Bob battled with several versions of cancer off and on for his last 20 years," he recalls. "Imogene died four years ago after many months in a full body cast for spinal cancer. They were both quiet folks, quiet and deliberate, accepting what life handed them without many comments."
A truly remarkable aspect of Wilden's work with the nonprofit Falls Church Housing Corporation (FCHC) was his own fundraising efforts that eventually secured another $500,000 in matching contributions.
Carol Jackson of the FCHC told the Falls Church News-Press that "Bob was a seed planter who not only challenged us with his 'think impossible' ideas, but then stayed to put his money, personal talents, and sacrificial time where his mouth was."
Wilden also served on the FCHC's board and spoke out frequently in favor of affordable housing to the Falls Church City Council and other policy groups, desiring, most of all, to maintain diversity in the community in which he and his late wife lived.
"For a few brief years," says Jackson, "Bob chose to leave his personal mark on our community—quietly and strategically initiating communal efforts to create, grow, and sustain caring enterprises that will leave a legacy, any one of which the normal civic-minded citizen would be proud to claim."
Wilden's chief legacy at HDS will be the scholar whom his very generous gift will support—an individual who will relate ethical questions to a broad range of social practices, including those of communities of faith.
"What was always striking to me about Bob," says Dean Graham, "was his generosity of spirit, his humility and modesty about his own many accomplishments, and his constant orientation toward a future that he would not see but could dedicate his own efforts and resources to making possible for the next generations."
From the reflective distance of half a century, Tibbetts remembers that "at HDS we learned to chuckle about people out there who put too much stock in the afterlife. But we chuckled at just about everything during those few years, before we grew up. And if we were wrong and there is some sort of heaven, it is a better place since Bob Wilden arrived."
