Joseph Harrison “Hank” Young ’79

Joseph Harrison “Hank” Young ’79 died on October 6, 2021, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, from cancer. He was born in Baltimore on April 18, 1957, and graduated in 1975 from the Gilman School. At Dartmouth Hank majored in government; was active with the Handel Society, Outward Bound, the Tucker Foundation, and WFRD; and wrote for the Jack-O-Lantern and Tower magazines. Following college Hank worked for three years as a newspaper reporter in Vermont before attending law school at the University of Chicago. In 1985, while clerking for a federal judge in Washington, D.C., he met and married Ann. Hank joined the law firm of Hogan & Hartson and also served for four years as a federal prosecutor. A leader in pro bono, for 20 years Hank worked to secure the release of a man who had been unfairly sentenced. In 2008 Hank and Ann moved to her home in Oklahoma, where he worked as the director of legal services and an administrative law judge for the Oklahoma Health Care Authority. Hank and Ann raised children William, Emma, and Thomas ’19. He loved backpacking and bicycling and was an accomplished guitarist and singer. Hank was well-loved by his Dartmouth classmates and friends and will be sorely missed. “He had no time for the hubristic, but all the time in the world for the hurt. He lived the true journalist’s creed: he afflicted the comfortable and comforted the afflicted.”