Adrianus Johannes Wouters, 94, of Manchester-by-the-Sea, known to his family and friends as “André,” died peacefully on November 23 at Sawtelle Family Hospice House in Reading, with his son by his side. He was born in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, on February 4, 1930, to Johannes Wouters and Wilhelmina Johanna (Struylaart) Wouters.
Andre lived a long and eventful life spanning both sides of the Atlantic. He was barely 10 when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in 1940, and never forgot the Luftwaffe pilots waving at him from the cockpits of their low-flying Heinkel He 111 bombers on their way to destroy Rotterdam. During the five-year occupation, his father bartered for food and coal on the black market, and his family raised rabbits on their balcony for meat. Andre and his friends also recovered silk parachutes from unexploded bombs for clothing, a risky activity that cost one of them his young life.
The son of a civil engineer, Andre earned a degree in architecture at the Hogere Technische School in The Hague, the city where he met his beloved Norwegian wife, Ragnhild, at the start of his career. They began a long courtship that continued across the English Channel in 1960, when she took a job in Blackpool, and he joined the firm of Chamberlin, Powell & Bon in London. It was there he found his architectural calling with the development of a student health care center for the University of Birmingham.
Like most fellow Dutchmen, he was an avid skater and cyclist who skated the frozen canals and biked throughout the Netherlands and surrounding countries with his younger brother and friends. In his early 20s, Andre bought his first motorcycle, a Triumph, on which he and Ragnhild enjoyed some memorable trips motoring around the Swiss and Austrian Alps.
In 1961, they married in the Netherlands and relocated to her native Norway, where they settled in Oslo and started a family. Andre worked for the firm of F.S. Platou, where he cemented his interest in health care as lead architect for an expansion of the Diakonhjemmet hospital. Although born a Dutchman, Andre felt a far stronger bond to Norway and its breathtaking beauty, and eventually spoke the language better than his native Dutch.
The young couple were always ready for a new adventure, and in 1964, Andre accepted an offer to relocate to the United States and join the firm of Anthony J.J. Rourke, in New Rochelle, NY, which specialized in health care facilities. They sailed into New York harbor in July 1964 with their young son and newborn daughter aboard the MS Oslofjord. They lived in New Rochelle before moving to Yorktown Heights in 1970, where they resided until 1980.
Andre and Ragnhild shared a deep love of the outdoors, and the family spent every summer camping up and down the east coast, and every winter cross-country skiing in New York and Vermont. They also hiked throughout the Hudson Valley, and took frequent trips back to Europe to visit family and friends. On weekends, Andre could often be found in his well-equipped workshop, working on various home improvement projects. He was also a lifelong fisherman, and taught his son at an early age. Together, they fished countless ponds, lakes and coastlines in the U.S., as well as many rivers, lakes and fjords in Norway.
At Rourke, as Vice President of Functional Planning and Design, he supervised more than 150 planning studies and building projects, ranging in size from 100-bed community hospitals to 1,000-bed medical centers. Andre’s work took him all over the country, including Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin.
He also managed a major expansion for the American Hospital of Paris, and oversaw the planning of a leprosy hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. In 1980, Andre joined the firm of Hans Finne in Wilmington, and moved to Boxford with his wife and daughter. During the next four years, he was principal-in-charge of all projects at Boston’s New England Medical Center, including the construction of one of the nation’s first MRI units.
In 1985, Andre and Ragnhild retired to Alfaz Del Pi, a small hillside town on Spain’s Costa Blanca, where he designed a house with views of the mountains and the Mediterranean. But when New England Medical Center contacted him to oversee more projects in 1987, he began shuttling back and forth between Spain and Manchester, where he set up shop as a consultant on the top floor of a family friend’s large house.
He and Ragnhild moved back to the states full-time in 1990, settled in Manchester, and continued traveling, even after she was diagnosed with cancer, which she fought for seven years before finally succumbing in 1998. Andre lived in Manchester for the next 26 years, buoyed by a large but ever-dwindling circle of friends as the years went by. He often joked that he was the “last of the Mohicans,” but constantly made new friends on his long, daily walks to Singing Beach and the harbor, well into his 93rd year.
He was the last surviving member of his immediate family, which included a brother, Johannes, and two sisters, Antonetta and Rosalia. He lost his daughter Camilla in 2020. He is survived by his son, Jorgen, granddaughters Freya and Alexandra, and numerous nieces and nephews in the Netherlands and Norway, all of whom loved him very much, and will always miss him.
There will be no local funeral mass or burial. Andre’s ashes will be taken to Norway next year to be buried alongside those of Ragnhild in a centuries-old churchyard overlooking the country’s largest lake.
