Jean Aldrich, community service activist and wife of UCI’s founding chancellor, dies at 96
Jean Hamilton Aldrich, wife of UC Irvine’s founding chancellor, Daniel G. Aldrich Jr., died Wednesday at age 96 in Irvine, where she witnessed the city’s growth around the university that had been her husband’s vision.
“You could see it in his eyes,” the university quoted her as saying as she recalled looking across the empty land with him. “He could ‘see’ a university and he could ‘see’ a town around it. And that is what happened.”
While the campus was under construction, Jean Aldrich involved herself in health and arts projects, serving on the boards of South Coast Repertory and a home for the developmentally disabled.
“She was the ultimate scout leader,” her eldest son, Daniel G. Aldrich III, who was interim vice chancellor for advancement at UCI from 2010 to 2012, said in a university news release. “She could organize the socks off a caterpillar.”
Once the campus was dedicated in 1964, Jean Aldrich started the first Town & Gown group, composed of faculty wives and women from Newport Beach and Costa Mesa. She also served on scholarship selection committees and defused a student demonstration with hot chocolate, cookies and prayer, according to the news release.
“It has been a wonderful two-person career in which I have been involved,” she told campus historian Sam McCullough in 1990. “It’s been a position of public trust and responsibility. Few people are afforded the opportunity for public service. Impact on a community and its institutions is a source of both pride and unmatched life experience.”
Her husband retired from UCI in 1984 and died six years later.
Jean Aldrich was honored in 1990 with the UCI Founders Award.
She is survived by her three children — Daniel G. Aldrich III; Elizabeth Toomey, who retired in 2012 as UCI’s assistant vice chancellor for government and community relations; and Stuart Aldrich, a businessman — as well as seven grandchildren and 16 great-grandchildren.
Celebration-of-life services will be announced in April. The family asks that in lieu of flowers, remembrances be sent to the Dan & Jean Aldrich Scholarship Fund or the Town & Gown Scholarship Fund at UCI or to Community Church Congregational in Corona del Mar.