Grant Michael “Mike” Dixon passed away peacefully at home at on August 26, 2026 at the age of 89.
Mike was born on August 2, 1937, in Ogden, Utah, the third of four sons born to Rulon Dixon and Erma Murdock. The family moved to Salt Lake City when Mike was two years old. His lifelong interest in the natural world was stimulated early on by summer scout trips, which included rafting down the Glen Canyon before it was submerged by the waters of Lake Powell.
He was a good student, who excelled in Math and Science, winning the Bausch-Lomb Award during high school as well as a full scholarship to Yale University. His career at Yale was somewhat checkered. He made the Dean’s List his freshman year, but his attention became diverted by nonacademic pursuits. As a result, in the middle of his junior year, the Dean advised that it would be wise for him to take some time off, since his course work was suffering badly.
During his hiatus from Yale, Mike worked for Hercules Powder and Thiokol, companies that made rocket engines for the Minuteman Missile Program, which were tested in the Utah desert. He also served as a “six month wonder” in the Utah National Guard. He returned to Yale and graduated in l962. In the summer after graduation he married Yvonne Romney, a Salt Lake City girl he had first met in junior high school. In the fall of 1962, he enrolled at Harvard Business School. Following graduation in 1964, Mike joined the MIT Fellows in Africa Program, which sent a dozen recent business and law school graduates to work for two years with various African governments, which were at that time receiving their independence from colonial powers. Mike served in the Kenya Treasury, where he worked on obtaining loans from the World Bank. His daughter Catherine was born in Nairobi in 1966.
Upon completing his fellowship in Kenya, Mike joined the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector affiliate of the World Bank. His son Michael Romney Dixon was born shortly afterwards in Washington, DC. He was to establish IFC’s first regional field office in Nairobi in 1974. His duties involved promoting private sector investments in 22 countries in East and Southern Africa. He and his family thoroughly enjoyed living in Kenya during their three years there, with its wonderful game parks and unique culture. Over the years Mike, an avid and discriminating book collector, amassed a large collection of rare books on East Africa. He was able to present to Mbiyu Koinange, the Kenya Minister of State, one of two copies Mike had collected of Koinange’s book on the Mau Mau rebellion. Until Mike gave him one, Koinange had possessed no copy of his own book. Eventually, Mike was to donate his entire book collection to the Brigham Young University library.
On the family’s return to Washington Mike became Division Manager at IFC for East and Southern Africa. Near the end of his thirty year career, Mike established a field office in Kiev, Ukraine right after the Soviet Union collapsed. Following that brief assignment he then ran IFC’s office in Cairo, Egypt, his final assignment before his retirement.
Mike was gifted with the helpfulness gene, always looking out for ways to be of service, whether stowing the bags of little old ladies in overhead racks on airplanes or serving in a broader capacity. In retirement he served on the Board of the Audubon Naturalist Society for the Middle Atlantic States and the Boards of the Cacapon Institute and Lost Rivers Land Trust in West Virginia, where the Dixons had built a weekend house and spent many happy vacations. He also served as a volunteer for the World Bank retirees program as well as the Palisades Village organization, taking those in need to doctors’ appointments, etc. In addition, for a number of years he helped maintain the Billy Goat trail that runs along the Potomac River, going so far as to take the chain saw course required by the National Park Service so that he could remove the trees that fell across the trail.
Mike maintained a lifelong interest in natural history, especially birds and plants. He took a number of courses through through Audubon and the Smithsonian. One course on edible plants included a week’s field trip which involved living solely off the land. (He came home after two days.) He also took a number of solo bird-watching trips: To see Sandhill cranes in Nebraska and albatrosses on Midway Island, for example. (During his “astronomy phase” he took Yvonne along to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico in 1991 to view the total solar eclipse). After Yvonne eventually retired, Mike and Yvonne traveled widely, indulging his interests in the natural world and hers in art and literature. Ultimately they visited a total of 173 countries before Covid struck in 2020, including little visited places like North Korea.
Mike will be deeply mourned by Yvonne, his loving wife of sixty-four years, by his son Michael and his daughter Catherine, and by his grandchildren Miles and Maisy Dixon. Whether at the Mt. Everest Base Camp in Tibet or throughout his lifetime, Mike Dixon was always at the top of the world. A memorial will be held at a later date. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Cacapon & Lost Rivers Land Trust, www.cacapon.org.