WOOD-- William Hiram Jr., 87, of Watertown, Mass., died Friday, September 26 at Mt. Auburn Hospital, Cambridge MA. He was born July 6, 1921 in Boston to William Hiram Wood, Sr., born in Lawrence MA in 1895, and Dorothy Pushee, born in Antigonish, Nova Scotia in 1892. He was the grandson of John Thomas Wood, born in 1864 in Saddleworth, Yorkshire, who immigrated to Lawrence as a young boy with his adoptive father Samuel Butterworth. He was the great-great grandson of Nathan Pushee, born 1758 in Lunenburg, MA, trumpet-major of General Washington's staff in the Revolutionary War. He grew up in Canton MA and graduated from Phillips Academy in 1938; he received his SB in American History from Harvard College in 1942; he served in the US Army Signal Corps in the Pacific on Saipan and Guam; he continued his education after the war on the GI bill; he received an MA from Boston University in 1947 and spent the next four years at Yale University pursuing an uncompleted PhD. He worked for the Air Force, the Institute for Naval Studies, the Sperry Rand Research Center, and the Electric Boat division of General Dynamics. From 1980 until his retirement in 1996, he was a technical writer with Intermetrics in Cambridge. He spent almost his entire life in Massachusetts, including many years in Framingham and Duxbury prior to finally settling in Watertown over 25 years ago. In 1942 he married the late Patricia Stevens, born in Newburyport MA in 1922, and in 1997 he married the late Julie Owen, born in Concord, NH in 1926.
He is survived by a son, William Hiram Wood of Watertown and a sister, Barbara Denton Wood Barnard, of Marstons Mills, MA and Melbourne, Florida. He was a lifelong lover of his country and the Democratic party; he was a passionate believer in equality of opportunity and economic justice.
Gifts in his memory may be made to the Democratic National Committee.
His cremated remains will be interred at the municipal cemetery in Canton. Atque in perpetuum pater, ave atque vale.