John D. Wharton ’60
John died quietly and gently Nov. 9, 2009, in Bartlett, N.H., in the company of his sons, David, Josh, and Tom, two weeks after being diagnosed with advanced esophageal cancer.
Born in Widnes, England, John attended The Hill School, where he played soccer and track and wrote prose and poetry for the newspaper and literary magazine. At Princeton he played freshman squash and track, joined Elm Club, and majored in English. His thesis aligned Dylan Thomas with the tradition of mystical poetry from Wales, where he traced his nationality. He worked on the Nassau Lit and served as president of the Mountaineering Club.
John made his career in secondary education, teaching at Robert Academy in Istanbul, Germantown Academy, and, for many years, at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. In parallel, he pursued a career as a painter and sculptor, and followed his passion for rock climbing and coastal and offshore sailing. Over the years, he owned a number of classic boats.
John’s first marriage ended in divorce, and his second and third wives predeceased him. The class extends condolences to his family.
Paw in print
November 2026
History is in Terri Sewell ’86’s hands; campus mental health culture; the two Princetons.
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Peter Kuniholm
1 Day AgoMemories from Istanbul
John helped me run a dormitory (Anderson Hall) at Robert Academy in the 1960s. One night, after having had a few beers, he found he had locked himself out of his fourth-floor room. So he climbed up the outside of the building (four stories down to asphalt), gripping onto the stones.
Since there were no beds in Istanbul long enough for him, the school carpenter made him a 7-foot-long bed, and we commissioned an appropriate mattress. But at the end of a semester he announced he was getting married, so the carpenter had to make him a new bed. On John’s and Jane’s arrival, I went to the airport to pick them up while my brother started the wood stove (unused for years) in their otherwise unheated apartment over the college gate. Jane took one look at the smoky room, the three overlapping mattresses (the new one was not yet ready), and the wolfskins which served as blankets, and exclaimed, “Oh, John, it’s beautiful!”
The marriage did not last.