Maggie DeWolf

This memorial obituary was written by Curtis Wackerle and published in Aspen Daily News (2016) here.

Maggie DeWolf had a way of seeing through people completely, accepting them and striving to make them their best selves, according to friends and family members. She passed away on Saturday at Aspen Valley Hospital at the age of 87.

Maggie DeWolf was married for 47 years to Nick DeWolf, an inventor known for designing, along with Travis Fulton, the dancing fountain on the Mill Street pedestrian mall. Friends and family members said the introverted Maggie loved playing the foil to her energetic husband, who passed away in 2006. She was also known for her intense focus. Through the Nick DeWolf Foundation, Maggie helped launch the winter physics lecture series associated with the Aspen Center for Physics that takes place in the Wheeler Opera House. The foundation also helped launch other nonprofits, including Aspen Journalism and the Aspen Science Center, and is a supporter of GrassRoots TV.

The DeWolf home at Second and Bleeker streets in Aspen’s West End is an eccentric delight, filled with art and artifacts from around the world. The lot next door, which was once home to an old-time Aspenite’s yurt, has been incorporated to form an expansive garden.

Maggie and Nick met while they were both living in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood in the 1950s, married and had six children. After graduating the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Nick founded an early computer-testing technology firm and designed over 300 products, including a groundbreaking circuit tester.

Nick’s success as an inventor allowed the family to move wherever they wanted to go, and they were drawn west, said daughter Nicole DeWolf. Though Nick had been on a ski trip to Aspen in 1950, they had no other connections to the town. But while driving through the state and stopping here, “it was like, this is it, this is home,” Nicole said. “It was completely unorthodox, a mixture of high and low, and you could still live here on a shoestring back then.”

The dynamic of “weirdos, intellectuals and ski bums” suited the family, and Nick set about bringing the first computers into the schools, traveling and working on projects such as the fountain. The computer program that guides the dancing water jets randomizes the movements to the point that you’d have to watch them for 70,000 years to witness the same 20-minute sequence, Fulton said.

It was Maggie’s operational support — organizing Nick’s schedule and keeping the home in order — that allowed Nick to do what he wanted to do, Nicole said.

Both Maggie and Nick were known for their devotion to the Aspen community and were instrumental in drafting the 1993 Aspen Area Community Plan. She wanted both people, and the community, to be the best they could be, and she enjoyed cultivating people, Nicole said. Fulton agreed.

“Maggie looked at me and she knew me right through — and she liked me anyway, and for that I am eternally grateful,” he said. He noted there are many other stories of people, some broken, taken in by the DeWolf household when they needed it most. 

“Together, they bracketed a huge amount of humanity,” Fulton said.

Maggie held a degree in journalism and in her earlier life had short stories published in the Atlantic. She was a prolific writer of letters to the editor, hitting local affairs and global philosophy.  

In 2009, for example, she opined on the city’s process to update the Aspen Area Community Plan. After participating in a “visioning” meeting, she didn’t find the content visionary enough — too focused on the economics of housing and transportation, according to her letter, published in the Aspen Daily News on Feb. 12, 2009.

“Do you, gentle readers, really believe that Nick DeWolf contemplated, for even a nanosecond, the dollars-and-cents cost of the fountain that he built in town?” DeWolf wrote. “If you think that the value lies in the pumps and computers that make up the fountain, you are terribly wrong; the value was and is in the idea, the conception and the long tedious hours of programming and none of the real value, including the joy of the kids who play in it, is measurable by the yardstick of money.”

Family members — who described their home growing up as an “idea hive” — agreed the line was exemplary of her world view. 

A Tribute to Maggie from the Aspen Center for Physics:

Ah, wonderful Maggie! For years, she has been a welcome presence at the Aspen Center for Physics. At our board meetings, at the winter public lectures, which she and Nick generously support, and at the Center – just stopping by on her way to or from her workouts. For many years, she designed and printed an eclectic assortment of fabulous posters to advertise the lectures, and over 15 years ago, she and Bea Block wrote “Chaos in the Kitchen” as a fundraiser for the Physics Center. Her wisdom was always accompanied by a twinkle and a chuckle. We will miss her.