Joe Malchow ’08 in Memory of Joe Asch | October 9, 2018
Read the introductory festschrift article here.
I regret to announce that Joseph Asch, Class of 1979, son of Dartmouth and editor of this website, died today, October 9, 2018, at his home in Hanover, New Hampshire. He was 60.
It is difficult to know what to say on the day of this shocking and painful loss.
From the day in 2004 when Joe’s front door on Woodrow Road in Hanover was thrown open to me, a totally alien freshman, we’ve been friends.
Most people who came into Joe Asch’s orbit knew at least two numbers about him. One was “something above 150,” which is what one estimated his IQ to be, although never discussed around him, just with others. The other was the year of the first bottle of carefully selected wine he opened for you, with a grand smile and a caring hand. Joe either chose a wine he thought you would like, or one which he liked and which would serve to expand your palate. You couldn’t have the former impulse (caring empathy) without the latter (the desire to educate). Take it or leave it. Fortunately, most people took it.
For the fourteen years I knew Joe, I knew myself to be in the presence of one of the single best livers I’d ever know. For raw intelligence, creativity, good will, generosity of spirit (a favorite phrase of his), relentless self-improvement, and absolute love for family there were few to equal him.
Joe offered to take over Dartblog when I graduated from Dartmouth in 2008. For ten years, with one hand tied behind his back, he did what I believe was the best journalism ever done at Dartmouth.
The hand tied behind his back worked on more profitable projects: his family above all, followed by the beautiful, growing, financially successful Upper Valley health club he created and managed, the River Valley Club. There was his wine collection. There was the writing tutor program he conceived and funded at Dartmouth. There were other businesses. There were the manifold small businesspeople, from ice cream entrepreneurs to tech startup founders, whom he mentored.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself,” Shaw wrote. “Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
Much progress happened because of Joe. His shining intelligent children, the River Valley Club — indeed this very web site, which began as my self-interested freshman-year project and ended, only because of Joe Asch’s sparkling writing, clean analysis, and massive network of trusting, devoted, admiring sources, as the most widely trafficked news website in the Ivy League. Over and over again, he created something from nothing.
Even a small revolution in the world of hypodermic needle manufacturing hygiene owes itself to Joe.
He was a strong man with a strong mind. He was a competitor. He seemed hard-headed, but of course that was only a feint: it was in service of the people and ideas he loved. If he advocated his point of view zealously, it was because he esteemed highly the strength of his audience.
No wonder he wrote about Dartmouth, which he loved, so passionately. It is not accurate to say that Joe was a “prominent critic” of the College. He was a prominent improver of the College. Over the years he gave, pro bono, millions of dollars of free management and financial consulting advice to Dartmouth. Joe’s analyses and advice, and Joe himself, was heard and understood by Dartmouth at the very highest levels of its administration and Board, from his first columns in The Dartmouth to this very day.
A regular thought of mine, as I have grown my own professional life and encountered any number of celebrated business leaders, has been to marvel at how wonderful it was that Joe, whose resume read Dartmouth/ Yale Law/ Bain, decided to be a small-town businessman. He was the kind of a man whose efforts make American life special. Joe made life special in Hanover, in Paris’s 16th arrondissement, in New Zealand, in London, and in other places, too.
This is no sort of eulogy, this 14,038th Dartblog post. Joe Asch’s personal, family, business, and journalistic successes will take some time to inventory. It is likely that he has made substantial accomplishments of which I know nothing solely because they were done in his faultless Italian or French.
Addendum: If you’d like to contribute a memory or nominate your favourite article written by Joe, e-mail us at dartblog.news@gmail.com. We’d love to hear from you!
