BERNE — Victor William Porlier Jr. was a man of ferocious intellect and stellar achievement. He died unexpectedly with his wife, Lois Porlier, at their East Berne home on Friday, June 4, 2021. He was 83. 

Born in Fort Lewis, Washington on Nov. 6, 1937, to a military family, Mr. Porlier was an “Army brat,” he wrote in a 2020 letter to the Enterprise editor, until his father died when Mr. Porlier was just 13. 

“In 1950, early in the Korean War, I began a radically new chapter in my life with my widowed mother (age 33) and younger sister (age 9) in Southern California,” Mr. Porlier wrote in his letter, which expounded on the values that his father had embedded in him during their time together. 

“He was a great dad,” Mr. Porlier wrote, “from whom I learned much about character, self-discipline (and rear-end discipline, too), standing up to older and bigger bullies, fulfilling commitments, completing tasks on time, respect for elders, love of country, and the Boy Scout Law — trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.”

Mr. Porlier’s lifelong love of learning was fostered in the libraries of Army bases he lived on, where he “read widely in books … and expanded my vocabulary with the monthly Reader’s Digest,” he wrote. 

Also, Mr. Porlier was a skilled member of the Boy Scouts, earning an Eagle Scout award when he was 14, a year after his father died. His was an upgraded experience since the Scout Masters were literal “jungle warriors,” he told The Enterprise in a 2017 podcast interview, explaining that his father had been stationed at the same base from which the Army conducted its jungle-operations training, yielding a unique set of instructors.

“Our camping trips were in the jungle, with sleeping hammocks up in the trees and watching out for snakes and all the rest,” Mr. Porlier said. “They were hardy men.”

Together with his facile and hungry mind, Mr. Porlier’s enriched upbringing would earn him admission to the University of California, Berkeley, from which he earned a dual bachelor’s degree in economics and political science, and later a master’s degree in public administration and public policy, his family wrote in a tribute.

After obtaining his master’s degree in 1960, Mr. Porlier joined former President John F. Kennedy’s administration, working for the United States Agency for International Development. 

From his time at Berkeley through his early years working for the government, Mr. Porlier was a passionate fan of the writer Aldous Huxley, and in 1963, Mr. Porlier took his then-wife on a two-week globetrotting trip that retraced a journey Huxley had taken earlier, Mr. Porlier said in the podcast interview, bringing with him works by Huxley, Kennedy, and the writer C.S. Lewis.

The couple left the United States for Central America on Nov. 22, 1963 — the same day that Kennedy was assassinated, Huxley committed suicide, and Lewis died of natural causes.

“In my mind, in those days, I was not a naturalist or materialist, philosophically; I was a supernaturalist — I still am — and it just shook me,” Mr. Porlier said of the timing of those four events and the metaphysical relationship between them. 

For a young, Berkeley-educated idealist, as Mr. Porlier described himself, that signal — along with the arrival of the Beatles in the United States mere months later, heralding the British Invasion and the counterculture movement with it — called into question the trust he placed in institutions, he explained, as people began to more widely question the role of corruption and other things in the upper echelons in government. 

Though he continued his career in bureaucracy through the turbulent 1960s, Mr. Porlier’s private misgivings boiled over in the 1980s when he read a book about the “Anglo-American establishment” that “evaporated” his former “idealistic democratic-socialist illusions from Berkeley,” he said in the podcast interview.

Mr. Porlier met his late wife, Lois, in the 1990s, and the two lived together in East Berne, while Mr. Porlier worked as a consultant and continued his private studies, amassing over 20,000 books in his library by the time he died, his family wrote in a tribute.

Mr. Porlier was a frequent contributor to The Altamont Enterprise opinion pages.

“Adulthood, with all its advances and victories as well as its retreats and defeats, amount to the far steeper learning curve of life than I imagined as a child,” Mr. Porlier wrote in the 2020 letter about his father. 

Recalling how, at his father’s funeral, his grandfather put his hand on the young Mr. Porlier’s shoulder and told him to “make Victor Sr. proud,” an older Porlier reflected on his efforts, through the “many ups and downs” that composed the curve of his life:

“And maybe,” he wrote, “even at 82 years of age, with Mom now gone as well, I still am trying to make Dad proud at some deep level.”

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Victor W. Porlier Jr. is survived by his sister, Valerie; his two sons, Marc and Jon; his daughter, Valerie; and his grandchildren, Sydney, Alexander, Emma, and Serena.

A memorial service and burial was held on Wednesday, June 16, at Elmwood Cemetery, in Selkirk.

Memorial messages may be left at www.altamontenterprise.com/milestones.

Memorial contributions may be made to the East Berne Volunteer Fire Company at 25 Main St, East Berne, NY 12059 or the Helderberg Volunteer Ambulance Squad at 978 Cole Hill Rd, East Berne, NY 12059.

— Noah Zweifel