Remembering Dana Crider

26 Sep Remembering Dana Crider

Dana Crider, beloved teacher, dorm parent, church leader, environmentalist and long-term Mussoorie resident, passed away on 18 September 2025. For over four decades, his larger-than-life presence was woven into the very fabric of the Woodstock and hillside community. His rich, booming voice could fill an auditorium, his beautiful singing – with that extraordinary vocal range of his – spoke to the soul, and his big heart, ready smile and listening ear touched countless lives, from Woodstock students, staff, employees and parents to coolies, local shopkeepers and residents of Mussoorie. He just loved people. He had that rare gift of making you feel as if you were the only one in the room whenever he talked to you.

A farmer’s son from Pennsylvania, Dana, with his wife Judy (née Smith, Class of ’69), arrived in Mussoorie in 1979 and immediately fell in love with the hills. At Woodstock, he was known for his humour, compassion and ability to make students feel at home. He often welcomed homesick boarders into his house for hamburgers or celebrated milestones with cakes in the dorm, always modelling family, resilience and love – qualities he embodied even when disciplining errant boys, many of whom deem these encounters with the formidable Mr Crider as some of the most positively influential in their lives.

Dana was also deeply practical, endlessly resourceful and unafraid of new challenges, strengths that saw him take on many different roles during his long career at Woodstock. He was Supervisor at Clifton Hostel from 1979 to 1988 and again from 1998 to 2001, becoming Residence Coordinator in 1996. Over the years, he also taught High School Mathematics, Counselling, Religious Education and Industrial Arts. He was Project Manager for the renovation of the Music Wing and Parker Hall and was heavily involved in designing and installing the system for pumping water up from Midlands Stream and piping it out to Community Centre and numerous Woodstock homes. He also served as Staff Representative to the Woodstock Board of Directors and guided three graduating classes as Homeroom Head. His retirement in 2014 marked the close of a remarkable journey of service to the school community.

Beyond Woodstock, Dana’s greatest practical legacy was co-founding and leading the NGO that would eventually become KEEN (Keeping the Environment Ecologically Natural), a waste management and recycling initiative that utterly transformed Mussoorie. As noted in several local, regional and national Indian newspapers, he invested his life savings – including his and his wife’s retirement funds – to establish and run the non-profit enterprise. Today, KEEN continues to lead the way, not only in keeping our town clean and our Himalayan environment healthy but in serving as a major source of employment for some of our most marginalised people. In 2021, Mussoorie was named the cleanest small town in Uttarakhand in the national Swachh Survekshan awards, an honour attributed wholly to the outstanding work of KEEN.

Dana dedicated his life to God, to his family, his church, his school and his community, and we are deeply grateful for that life, rooted as it was in tireless service and care of others. He will be remembered for the profound impact of his life, actions and conversations, and for his ability to inspire all those who knew him to live with the same authenticity, consistency, energy, kindness and love he exemplified throughout his life. We shall miss him more than words can express.

We invite you to share your tributes and memories of Mr Crider in the comments below.

Further reading and tributes:

· The Woodstocker (4 April 2019): Making life real with Mr Crider

· NewsPost (18 September 2025): Gone but not forgotten: Dana Crider

· The Times of India (18 Sept 2025): Woodstock School’s ex-teacher, KEEN chairman Dana Crider dies at 73

· Conversation with Palden Tshering ’91: Instagram Video