Remembering Harwood “Woody” Hoover, Jr.

Remembering Harwood “Woody” Hoover, Jr.
Professor Emeritus of Business Administration, Aquinas College
October 6, 1945 – March 1, 2026.

By John T. Jones, Aquinas College ‘13, Grand Valley State University ‘21 

  Last August marked 17 years since I walked into my first undergraduate class—Marketing 101. It was the class where I learned about branding and decided that if a company could have a brand, so could a person, and the guy in a bow tie was created.

But that class was impactful in another way. It was taught by a professor who would become my academic advisor, career counselor, mentor, and friend of the past 17 years, Woody Hoover. Not Doctor Hoover. Just Woody, because “only those who got their PhDs from inferior universities insisted upon being called Doctor.”

His class introductions included his attendance at the University of Colorado on a Navy ROTC scholarship from 1963 to 1968, where he earned a degree in psychology. Based on his own admission, it could easily have been considered a double major in psychology and partying.

It was usually at this point in his introductions that he’d mention that his priorities started with gas and beer money, a few other things, and only then with academics, making him a solid C-student.

That changed when he enrolled in flight school, which was paid for by his scholarship. The flight manual, which was required reading in its entirety, resembled the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area phone book of the day, with over 800 pages. Thumbing through the chapters, particularly the one on deicing a carburetor in freefall, forever changed his mindset as a student. C-pilots DIED! He would go on to elevate his undergraduate degree, earn a 4.0 in his MBA at Western Michigan University, and earn a Doctorate of Philosophy in Business Administration with distinction from Michigan State University.

Not much happened on the first day of classes besides introductions and reviewing the syllabus, so the stories and context of Woody’s background continued. He was raised in the Chicago suburbs and, after graduating from the University of Colorado, enlisted in the Navy as a gunnery officer. He spent four years in the Navy from 1968 to 1972 and, in between deployments to Vietnam, met and married Carol.

After his time in the Navy, Woody spent six years in corporate America, the first part of which he spent in school for his MBA courtesy of the GI Bill. The first two years were at Martin Marietta, selling commercial aluminum. He then moved on and was a pricing analyst at Unjohn Company, which Pfizer later acquired. After two years there, he moved to Amway and, after a few promotions over two years, left as supervisor of market plans.

It was during his time at Amway that he and Carol would settle into the northeast-most tip of Ada, on Big Crooked Lake. Why a lake? Well, if he couldn’t have the Hoover Air Force, he should at least have a place to deploy the Hoover Navy. His lower-level office overlooked the lake, and every available shelf space was filled with one of his collections—model cars, particularly the muscle cars of the 1960s and 1970s.

He loved cars, particularly his custom-order 1968 Firebird convertible, which was built in Van Nuys, California, and delivered to him while he was at the University of Colorado in Boulder before he deployed. He would later sell it to one of his Aquinas students, who would go on to sell it to Jay Leno in 2019. Leno was interested in the car due to its rarity. While muscle cars of the 1960s and 70s were famous for their V8 power, Woody was attracted to the vision of Chevrolet’s John DeLorean (yes, that DeLorean), who, with its inline six-cylinder overhead cam design, four-barrel carburetor, and four-speed manual transmission, was trying to compete with the Jaguar E-Type.

On the other side of the lower-level walkout, what would have been a storage room was Woody’s standard-gauge model railroad. Cars and trains were mutual interests between us, and ones we often talked about.

But back to introductions…

As he liked to tell it, “in 1977, after six years of selling metal, deciding how high a price could be legally charged for life-saving drugs (or whether to develop Rogaine instead), and being part of the pyramid scheme investigation by the FTC of Amway, he decided to go spend the next 36 years of his career working for nuns at Aquinas College. He was proud to work for an institution that, by the design of the Dominican Sisters, had some of the lowest-paid tenured faculty, but some of the highest-paid support staff. The philosophy was that it didn’t matter how good the professors were, if there wasn’t heat in the winter or clean buildings.

Aquinas made a deal with him: if he went to do his PhD at Michigan State during the day, they would keep his course load in the evenings, which he did for seven years until it was finished in 1984. He noted that he would never have been able to do that today, given that most doctoral programs require teaching at their own institution rather than another. His dissertation examined the impacts of deregulation on the commercial trucking industry, specifically the Motor Carrier Act of 1980. Regulatory control vs free-market economics would be a frequent topic of discussion during his ethics courses.

Woody’s introductions also included his wife, Carol, a now-retired fourth-grade teacher in Greenville Public Schools, and daughter, Holly, an art director at Eerdmans Publishing. Both were frequently referenced in class stories, examples, and our many conversations. My favorite Carol story is how they met. Carol, a native Californian, met Woody in the Officers Club. As Woody told the story, Carol was regularly asked why she went to the Officers Club to find a potential significant other. Her quick retort was and still is, “At least they knew how to be gentlemen.”

Over the next four years, I would go on to take every class he offered, including both of his business ethics courses. During his first stint as chair of the business department, he insisted that an ethics course be developed and required for the major, something Harvard didn’t do until 2009, the year I started at Aquinas. Realizing that much of ethics was rooted in philosophy, he collaborated across departments to develop and then co-teach the first course.

The word education comes from two Latin words: educare, to train, mold, or nourish, and educere, to lead out, draw out, or bring forth. Many professors never make it past the first with their long diatribes, waxing eloquent, or just loving the sound of their own voice. Woody spent his time in the second. It was part of the reason I loved his classes. They weren’t a lecture. They were a conversation, and everyone took part.

He had a black attaché briefcase for each class, which carried his notes, the course materials, and a set of note cards with each student’s name on it. Throughout each class, he would flip through the cards in succession to determine who was to answer his next question. One’s participation and attendance grade was determined by the balance of the marks on the card at the end of the semester.

Woody’s Chicago upbringing and Naval experience made him fair but no-nonsense. He jested that if you came to class and didn’t fall asleep and drool on your desk, you could at least pass, but As weren’t just handed out like candy.

One of my favorite no-nonsense stories is a discussion about the required reading for a business ethics class—Phillipa Foot’s Natural Goodness. A quick search for reviews of the book reveals that even her philosophy colleagues found the writing overly dense and convoluted. But it was a good message if one could get through it. If one got through it being the operative phrase.

I won’t name the individual who was up first to discuss chapter one, but his answer to an open-ended “what did you think of it?” was “I liked the cover.” Hoover went through the entire set of cards, asking everyone what they thought of the cover. When he got to me, I added a bit of commentary, noting that I didn’t think the cover was representative of the content outlined in the first chapter but that it might make more sense over time. I was awarded extra points for having a rationale for my response. When he made it back to the original cover-admirer, Woody asked pointedly what he thought of the content of the first chapter. Unsurprisingly, the student hadn’t opened the book.

Woody would put as much effort into you as you put into yourself. I discovered that during my first few office-hour visits. There wasn’t a rush to answer your question and get back to whatever he was doing before you walked in, but active engagement. So, over my four years, I frequented his weekly office hours to soak up as much wisdom and guidance as I could, but often just to chat.

He encouraged me to write not only as a way of conveying ideas, but even more as a way to bring clarity to thought and to process. It’s how this writing started after I learned of his death from Carol. He even suggested we coauthor a digital marketing textbook when I landed my first job on Amway’s North American Digital Marketing team in the middle of my junior year.

In 2014, after 36 years of teaching at Aquinas, Woody retired. I was honored to be at the celebration of him and other Aquinas retirees and to meet Carol and Holly for the first time. Moreover, Woody had inquired whether I would like the academic library he had amassed over his career. I gratefully accepted. And I still have the Harwood Hoover, Jr. Collection in my personal library.

Until the COVID pandemic changed things, we met regularly to talk about everything from the books we were reading and what we were writing to my career, philosophy, current events, stories from our lives, and good jokes. A gathering wasn’t complete without a jab or two about when I was going to get my MBA and PhD, so I could leave corporate America, like he did, to teach.

Six years after undergrad, I decided it was time to do just that and went back to school for my MBA in June of 2019. As always, Woody was close counsel: where the degree came from and how much it cost were far less important than the effort one put into the degree. The only exception was when the goal was to go on to a consulting firm, where that mattered. I wasn’t looking to be the next cog in a consulting machine, so I landed at Grand Valley State University in a two-year program, which allowed me to continue working.

Woody offered to write a letter of recommendation for the program, which is humbling beyond expression, particularly knowing that he didn’t mince words. It hangs next to the diplomas in my study.

May 18, 2019

Admissions Committee
GVSU Graduate School
Allendale Michigan

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

This will be short, as I only have this to say. John Jones was the best student in any of my classes during my 36-year career at Aquinas College. He was not afraid to be different, and academic excellence was part of that differentiation. The other part was that he was a very dapper dresser, further differentiating him from the ocean of baseball caps and sweatshirts in the class.

With the exception of a couple of my favorite books, my entire professional business library went to John when I retired.

You won’t do better than to admit this outstanding student.

Respectfully,

Harwood Hoover, Jr.

Harwood Hoover, Jr., Ph. D.
Professor Emeritus of Business Administration
Aquinas College

In September of 2021, after I finished the degree and the pandemic calmed down, I made my first visit to Woody and Carol’s home. It had been a while since we had caught up, but it was as if no time had passed at all. We caught up on life, my program, my recent job change, and some of the health and mobility challenges he had been experiencing.

It was then, in a way that only happens in the world’s largest village of Grand Rapids, MI, that our worlds got even smaller. We started talking about my husband, Nicholas VanderLaan, who was from Greenville, MI. Carol perked up with a mention that she had taught in Greenville and recalled having a VanderLaan in one of her classes. She quickly went inside and surfaced with an album made for her when she had retired. There, on the page for the 2001, Room 23 Fourth Grade Class, was Nicholas.

Many things connect our lives, like the theory of the invisible string: our grandparents both introduced us to classical music and opera; our parents were married exactly two weeks apart; they waited six years to have children, and then had us seven months apart to the day. And we both had a Hoover as our teacher. Some might say that all that and 50 cents will get you a phone call on a payphone if you can find one, but I like to think of it in the mindset of Carl Jung’s synchronicity, which I learned about while studying the history of philosophy with Woody. It’s the idea that two events are insignificant until they are connected by timing or people.

Last fall, shortly after Woody’s diagnosis with small-cell lung cancer, likely from exposure to Agent Orange while in Vietnam, Nick and I traveled up to the lake together to reunite with our teachers. It was as though no time had passed, with the conversation easily flowing from topic to topic as they always had. Each time we started to conclude and say our goodbyes, Woody would begin another story from his life or a memory from our classes together, as though he didn’t want the moment to end. The gathering, which began at 2:30 pm, ended as the sun began to set over the lake.

Two weeks later, on October 6, Woody celebrated his 80^th and last birthday. As the months passed, I thought of him often. Wondering when the inevitable news would come.

This past week, I got an email from Carol while at a conference; only the night before, I had told his C-Pilots Die story to coworkers at dinner. Woody’s sun had set over the lake that had brought much joy and countless memories over the decades.

May Woody’s impact be a lasting memory to all those whose lives he touched—it surely will be for me.