enters into rest at 66.
When Andy Savitz attended Weston High School, other students “thought he’d be
president,” said Peter Fenn, a friend since their grade school years. Such a prediction was understandable. Mr. Savitz, Fenn said, “was the president of the student body for all four years” and possessed confidence that couldn’t be taught: “He was one of the funniest person I’ve ever met, with a gift for oratory language and the quick quip.”
Instead of running for national office, Mr. Savitz helped run the 1988 presidential
campaign of Governor Michael S. Dukakis — offering war room training and advice to
George Stephanopoulos, a then-young political aide. While working in state government,
Mr. Savitz began focusing on the environment and in later years consulted with
businesses on sustainable growth.
Sustainability, he wrote in “The Triple Bottom Line,” his 2006 book, “respects the
interdependence of differing aspects of human existence. Economic growth and financial
success are important and provide significant benefits to individuals and society as a
whole. But other human values are also important, including family life, intellectual
growth, artistic expression, and moral and spiritual development.”
Mr. Savitz, who had been principal of the consulting firm Sustainable Business
Strategies, based in Greater Boston, died Jan 29 in Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
after collapsing in his Brookline home. He was 66 and had suffered a stroke a few
months earlier.
“When he was younger, he could probably have done anything with his life because he
was so smart. He chose to be an environmentalist,” said his son Noah. “He dedicated
himself to the future of the world — what me and my two siblings will be living in. He
dedicated his life to the future.”
As assistant secretary for law enforcement in the state executive office of environmental
affairs, Mr. Savitz made it clear to chief executives what their companies faced if they broke pollution laws.
“We’re using criminal provisions in the environmental laws to raise the stakes on
environmental crime,” he told the Globe in 1990, when he was part of the Dukakis
administration.
“We’re moving out of the first-generation environmental cheaters, the midnight dumpers
who just dump hazardous waste and run,” he added. “Now we’re into second-generation
technical crime, committed by people who may not be aware of the risks.”
Serving as chief of the state’s Environmental Crime Strike Force, Mr. Savitz “had a very
unified and very focused and very successful game plan for the enforcement of state and
federal environmental laws,” said John P. DeVillars, a former New England
administrator for the US Environmental Protection Agency.
DeVillars, who also had been environmental affairs secretary under Dukakis, later
formed a consulting firm with Mr. Savitz, and the two then worked together consulting
on environmental issues for the giant accounting firm Coopers & Lybrand.
Mr. Savitz’s resume also included working as a partner in the sustainability services
practice with the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. While there, he encouraged
business leaders to attend the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development, which
was held in Johannesburg in 2002.
The time had arrived “for CEOs to demonstrate that they get it,” he wrote in a Globe
opinion piece. “It is time for you and your counterparts to get off the beach and prove to
the public that you care about something more than that day’s bottom line or your own
compensation. Something must be done to redirect and repair corporate America.”
Andrew Wade Savitz was born in Newton and was in elementary school when his family
moved to Weston. He was the oldest of four siblings whose parents were Herbert Savitz
and Adel Shabshelowitz.
Early on, Mr. Savitz “had a knack for finding terrific mentors and working with them,”
said Fenn, his friend since childhood.
Mr. Savitz was just as adept at friendship. “He was very much a leader. And Andy always
kept in touch with people from his past,” said Penny McGee, his former wife.
“All of us who were his friends were blessed to have such a fiercely loyal and deeply kind
friend,” DeVillars said. “Once you were Andy’s friend, he stuck with you through thick
and thin, good times and bad. That was his most endearing quality.”
After graduating from Weston High School, Mr. Savitz went to Johns Hopkins University
in Baltimore and “ran Hopkins the way he ran Weston High,” Fenn said.
That led to Mr. Savitz landing a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. He studied at New
College in Oxford, England, and returned to get his law degree from Georgetown
University Law Center.
Mr. Savitz held jobs on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., before returning to
Massachusetts to work in state government.
In addition to working with legislators, he was a top aide to Frank T. Keefe, the state
secretary of administration and finance. Then he was press secretary for Kitty Dukakis
during her husband’s 1988 presidential bid, before moving to the campaign’s issues and
communications staff.
“I thought that Andy was the most brilliant, loyal, and supportive and best boss,” said
Hilary Gabrieli, who was a legislative aide when she worked with him. “He was lost too
soon because he still had so much to do to change the world. He wasn’t done.”
Mr. Savitz also seemed able to accomplish the impossible. During the Dukakis
presidential campaign, he rounded up 76 trombone players from 17 Iowa towns and six
states to perform in Mason City, Iowa, in November 1987 under the direction of Harry Ellis Dickson — the father of Kitty Dukakis and a former associate conductor of the Boston Pops.
“There is a trombone network out there,” Mr. Savitz noted with pride in a Globe
interview that month.
To friends and to all he knew — including those in the media who interviewed him for
work — Mr. Savitz “was an extraordinary giving character,” said Larry Tye, an author and
former Globe reporter.
“He had a wonderful sense of humor and lit up a room with his bright spirit,” DeVillars
recalled.
Mr. Savitz “was public spirited in the best sense of the word,” Fenn said. “He was a
lifelong and fervent Democrat, with both a small d and a large D. He was very much a
public citizen. How’s that for an epitaph?”
A service has been held for Mr. Savitz, who in addition to his son Noah and former wife,
Penny, leaves his mother, Adel of Greenwich, Conn.; his daughter, Zuzzie of Brookline;
another son, Harry of Brookline; and three brothers, Peter and John, both of Greenwich,
Conn., and Matthew of Weston, Conn.
Mr. Savitz “was a very, very engaging and captivating storyteller,” said Rabbi William
Hamilton of Congregation Kehillath Israel in Brookline.
“And his smile and his gaze could really animate you with some special energy that would
bring about some real possibilities that, if you were not in the room, you might not have
been imagined, let alone executed,” Hamilton added.
Above all, Mr. Savitz hoped to energize others to pay attention to the environment, and
to take action.
“The legacy he leaves behind to me and my siblings is that you have to look ahead to the
future,” Noah said. “You can’t just live in the moment. You have to have to think about the future.”
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