John died quietly on November 5, 2024, at home on the Island Farm in Whitehouse, New Jersey. He looked out on Rockaway Creek where he skated as a child and at a dam he built with rocks gathered from nearby fields, the fields he helped preserve as permanent farmland. He was the son of Elizabeth Dickson Boies and Reeve Schley Jr. His early schooling began in Fort Riley, Kansas where his father had enlisted in the US Cavalry at the beginning of WWII. John moved to New York City and attended the Allen Stevenson School. At the time his father was dropped behind enemy lines in France with the OSS. At war’s end his family returned to the Island Farm. It was a working dairy farm and John raised Road Island Red chickens and helped make hay during the summers. He played on the six-man football team at Far Hills Country Day School and competed in the summers at local horse shows jumping bare back over post and rail. In 1956 he graduated from St. Paul’s School where he loved playing hockey on the school pond and wrote at his 50th reunion: “For me the metaphor and forever will be. The black ice and the rumble of the boards. The echo of the stick, puck and blades on ice. The cry of young boy’s voices with the fading light”. John was captain of the varsity hockey team and captain of the Delphian baseball team. After a year in Toronto at Upper Canada College, John went to Yale and played hockey on the top line for Murray Murdock. In 1963 he volunteered for the Peace Corp and was sent to Brazil to organize 4-H Clubs in Santa Catarina. For months he would make the rounds to his kids chicken farms with a cast on his leg; broken in a barefooted soccer game. Later in New York City, John wrote about his Peace Corp experience and was known for the many stories of his adventures. On the Island farm he set up an equestrian operation and built a state-of-the- art indoor riding facility. He practiced real estate and continued to play hockey with the Far Hills Foxes. The fall of communism in eastern Europe inspired him to lead hockey trips to Prague, Warsaw, Budapest, Moscow and Slovenia. On a trip to Manchuria, the team was caught in a blizzard. When the plane finally took off from Changchun, John took the microphone and addressed the passengers with a poem describing the Chinese winter landscape. He is survived by his brother Reeve Schley III, (Georgia Terry), his niece Marie, (Nick Morton), his nephew Reeve T., (Brittney Martin).
To plant trees in memory, please visit the Sympathy Store.