Editor’s note: Sidney native William Dodd passed away in mid-July. The following tribute was written by his friend and cofounder with Dodd of Mother Jones magazine. He titled it, “A Man of Qualities.” It is used here with permission of the author.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — You no doubt recognize the woman on the left (in the photo) — but not the man on the right. That’s a shame.

Given all his contributions to Mother Jones and scores of progressive causes over a forty-year-long career. Yet you don’t because he preferred modest anonymity to noisy celebrity — an old-fashioned attitude, alien to the Online-Always Age, but one perfectly characteristic of this man of qualities.

Bill Dodd was a founder of Mother Jones, an immensely creative and skilled tactician who was far more than that, who had — at age 24 — taken charge of helping to conceive, launch, and then build the magazine’s readership from zero to nearly a quarter million in three short years, which set the magazine on course for what is now a forty-year-long history of courageous, muckraking journalism.

But kick-starting Mother Jones was just the start: Bill went on to work with (literally) scores of liberal and progressive organizations and candidates. First as cofounder of San Francisco-based Parker/Dodd, then as head of his own firm, Dodd Smith, he lifted a tiny, young environmental group called Greenpeace from having a shoebox of supporters on 3-inch by 5-inch cards to nearly 750,000 members, in the process thrusting them from near-anonymity to worldwide power and recognition serving a sustainable environment.

He proved invaluable to the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, locating hundreds of thousands of supporters and millions of dollars for George McGovern, Ron Dellums, Ted Kennedy, Bella Abzug, Ed Markey, John Glenn, and Alan Cranston, to name a few. PETA used his talents to swiftly rocket from being a small, unnoticed local group into a national powerhouse fighting for animal rights.

When Hollywood producer Norman Lear, appalled at the destructive intolerance of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and the Religious Right, decided to fight back, he turned to Bill to help launch People for the American Way. Sierra Club, ACLU, Common Cause, anti-nuclear groups, investigative reporting funds — scores of progressive causes and candidates over the next two decades turned to Bill Dodd to help them in their fights for justice and equality.

He rarely turned any of them away.

By the time he stepped back in the 1990s, he’d raised over $300,000,000 from more than two million Americans for those causes and candidates — a huge reservoir of dollars, donors and volunteers for the issues we care most about, as the nation was turning steadily rightward.

He was in short a battlefield hero, even though until now known by name to only a few — in keeping with the qualities he admired and modeled.

Bill was a battlefield hero in a second, private, quite different way: from Mother Jones onward, he had battled multiple sclerosis.

His father, James Dodd, had died of it, and Bill had grown up watching the degenerative nerve disease rob his father of life, in terrible slow motion. The spasms, the fatigue, the neuropathy, eventually the steady, inescapable loss of muscular control had come in steady procession, but nearly two decades passed before he died, half that time spent in wheelchairs and darkened rooms, while Bill’s mother, Marguerite, divided her life of constant motion and concern between work as an elementary school art teacher, raising Bill and his brothers and caring for her husband.

Marguerite Dodd repeatedly assured her son that MS isn’t genetically hereditary — but by the time he was 14, Bill knew that first-degree relatives like himself were significantly more likely to contract the disease, though no one knew why, just one of the mysteries of MS. There are lots of theories about the disease, for example, but little is really known about its causes — smoking may play a role, certain genes may have a part, stress (some think) could be a factor, some environmental conditions seem to be involved. A cure, more importantly, is still undiscovered.

The inevitable question arose — did he have MS? — but there was no answer.

As a teenager growing up in Sidney, Ohio, an old industrial and commercial town northwest of Dayton, Bill had plenty of other things to think about. For one, he loved school, and was quite good at it, especially history, science, and math. He was also an athlete — a superb one, who earned eight varsity letters, set the school’s (still-unbroken) record throwing the discus, and was named an all-Ohio quarterback his senior year with the Sidney High Yellow Jackets.

Late that fall, his father got a call from Woody Hayes, the legendary football coach at Ohio State. Was Bill interested in playing for him, Hayes wanted to know. It was a more than tempting offer, one most high school players would die for — but Bill had applied to several other schools, and Harvard wanted him as well.

And so in September 1967, Bill Dodd walked proudly and expectantly onto the Harvard campus, only to discover by mid-winter that something about the school, about him, about the times didn’t sit right. “My high school co-captain was in Vietnam crawling around rice paddies,” he later recalled. “I was walking around Harvard. I couldn’t make the two things mesh. Finally I said, ‘I’m going to leave until I figure out my place in the world.’”

That search — after a second brief attempt at Harvard — at just 20 put him on the streets, a college dropout in need of a job. He ended up in California, several thousand miles — and light years culturally — away from both urbane Harvard and small-town Ohio.

Almost by accident, he stumbled into a clerical job at a magazine in San Diego where he quickly advanced. Then came a second magazine job, this time in circulation and fundraising, at a think tank in Santa Barbara; he finally at 24 at the yet-to-publish Mother Jones in San Francisco. By then, his full-fledge specialty, built on his gift for math, was the (quite esoteric) world of subscriptions. Its complex testing, meticulous mathematical assessment of results, and the canny creative instincts for what might work next suited him. It was all done with pencils, spreadsheets, and first desktop, then pocket, calculators (the last, at the time, considered a technological marvel). Bill ended up loving Mother Jones, his colleagues, San Francisco and hiking in the Sierras and along the Redwood Coast as much as the challenge of building a progressive political voice with nationwide reach so soon after Watergate.

But as Mother Jones took off, he began to notice something ominous — first his legs at times felt pricked by “pins and needles”, then his hands would occasionally go numb, making it hard for him to write, open a door, or dial a phone. He waited for the diagnosis — but knew what it would be: he had MS.

He could have quit working and gone on disability at that point, knowing where lay ahead. But he didn’t. Men and women of quality just don’t do that. Instead, Bill decided he’d try to “outrun” the disease. “We were just coming out of a period where, if you had MS, they would tell you just to go sit in a corner,” he once explained. “I tried to get as much in and as much out of my body as I could before [MS] caught up with me.”

So he went on building for others — first Mother Jones, then Greenpeace, the then Common Cause and Ted Kennedy and Ron Dellums and PETA and all the other progressive groups he could, for years keeping his MS a secret. It worked until it didn’t, until after more than a decade of struggling, he could no longer walk upright and began to use a wheelchair.

The wheelchair was a turning point. Reflecting on his life, he decided he had some unfinished business to attend to. He decided he needed to back and finish his Harvard degree.

So thus in the fall of 2000, Bill Dodd returned to Harvard Yard—this time in his wheelchair, with his partner Shawn Grogan, who accompanied him to all his classes, took his notes, and typed the papers and wrote the exam answers as he dictated them to her. He — he liked to say “we” — proceeded to earn a degree in government, graduating (in the words printed on his degree) Harvard Class of 1971 (2002). There had been plenty of struggles getting there but learning — college learning — had awakened him to a new life of mind, whatever his body was doing to him. So he quickly applied and was admitted to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government for a masters degree. Asked why, by now in his fifties, he wanted more school, he replied simply, “I think it could help me find new ways to help people.”

Late last year, the terminal signs of MS began to appear. After finishing his Harvard degrees, he’d done what he’d planned: he went back to helping people. For more than a decade, as his body slowly kept giving way, he advised magazines, nonprofits, schools, causes and politicians. Voice-activated software let him write by speaking; he couldn’t go to people, so they came to him, in his Cambridge condo a quarter mile north of Harvard Yard. But there’d been tragedies over that decade of service: his partner, Shawn, had died suddenly of lung cancer. His mother, in her eighties, had then moved to Cambridge to care for him, but she too had died, at 92, also of cancer.

For the past two years, Bill had stayed mobile by blowing into a tube that guided his wheelchair. (If you look closely at the picture of Bill with Elizabeth Warren, you can see the tube just below his smiling face.) He’d stayed in touch with the world, an avid watcher and reader of news, sent off emails with his dictation software and talked, often at length, on his phone’s wireless headset.

Starting around Thanksgiving, Bill had started to catch colds much more often, and the colds had grown quickly worse, necessitating ambulance trips and week long stays in hospitals. “It wasn’t,” he wryly observed, “much fun.”

Early in July, he went back into hospital yet again, and was sent home after a miserable five days. He had recovered enough to read his emails, but his voice was too weak to dictate replies. He listened to phone messages, clearly pleased to hear from his friends, but had no way to answer.

His caregivers put him to bed and, the next morning, decided to let him sleep late. But he didn’t awaken, so once again ambulance, ER, ICU; this time though it was different. Doctors found he’d suffered two massive, bilateral strokes in the middle of the night; there was no chance of recovery.

Bill Dodd died at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital on Monday, July 17, age 68. He lived a rich and wonderfully useful life, and a man of qualities to the end, he’d left the world a better place.