STUART GOLDSMITH ’53
STUART GOLDSMITH, 82, a corporate executive and international businessman, died July 23, 2013. A member of Alpha Delta Phi, he received his degree with honors and with high distinction in history and literature. After serving in U.S. Navy Intelligence, he received an MBA from Harvard Business School and began his career in international business. His wife, Ann Crombie, predeceased him.
Richard “Dixie” Sanger ’52 offers these reflections on his friend:
I have the sad duty of reporting the death of Stuart Goldsmith on July 23, 2013, at his home in Bellport, NY.
Chip had been in declining health for years, but as recently as last March, when Maggie and I visited him at his winter home in Florida, had seemed to have staged another of his remarkable recoveries. We had a lovely time dining with him and, of course wining with him (although you will be glad to know I abstained) and enjoyed the company of a couple of his lady friends, being careful never to acknowledge the existence of the one in the presence of the other.
Chip was in good spirits, moving around without too much discomfort, and still driving, although not well. (Nothing new in that; he was always a better guide than driver.) Shortly after returning to Long Island for the summer, however, he fell ill again. From a distance, our best diagnosis is that his much-repaired heart finally gave out; this time there were no more medical miracles to performed. Chip had enjoyed nearly 25 years of borrowed time; his first heart attack, which hit as he was hustling to board a plane at what was then Washington National Airport, would have killed him had it not taken place with skilled help (and a defibrillator) right at hand.
Last Friday he was taken off all life-support devices save an oxygen inhalator, and sent home from Stony Brook Medical Center. The doctors told him he might live two more hours, or two more weeks. He called a few friends, including Maggie and me, to say goodbye. I was able to tell him I loved him and that I would pray for him, whether he liked it or not.
As you may know, Chip had little use for organized religion; he acknowledged that there might be some cosmic Power beyond his understanding, but would never accept the idea of what he called “an interventionist God.” Ironically, he was the kid with the religious upbringing; I came from an essentially pagan home. In his teens he was an acolyte at Wilmington’s Trinity Church, where in 1953 he would be invited to be best man at my marriage to Margaret Marvel. (Delayed by problems on the Pennsylvania Railroad’s main line north of Wilmington, he arrived — in his officers’ training sailor suit — just in time to see Maggie and me emerge from the church.)
Chip was my oldest friend. We met when he was eight and I had just turned nine. Our fathers — both mechanical engineers — worked together building paper-making machines at the Pusey & Jones Corp. on Wilmington’s riverfront. My brother Frank, 13 years older than I, was at the Naval Academy at the time and had gotten tickets to the Army-Navy game in Philadelphia. The Frank Sangers and the Phil Goldsmiths were going up from Wilmington together. The families assembled at the Goldsmiths’ home in Wawaset, where I first met their son (an only child), Chip. Oddly, the first home Maggie and I owned — a couple of decades later — was the other half of this semi-detached house on Macdonough Road.
Many will remember Stuart as a serious student who graduated with high distinction from Wesleyan. What many of you may not realize, however, is that in an earlier incarnation he was an equally serious jock who showed little promise as a scholar. At Wilmington Friends School, he was the shortstop who backed me up — and first gave me the nickname “Dixie” — when I was on the mound pitching. Sent off to Macdonough, a military school in Baltimore, for an infraction that was never fully disclosed, he went on to play quarterback in a league where Friends School’s Quakers could never have held their own.
I might never have been a Wesleyan Alpha Delt but for Chip, and Chip might never have been one but for me. Chip’s cousin, Ann Hamm, was dating Brother Bob Ludlum in 1948, when I was recruited to go to Wesleyan. Through Chip and his family, I met Bob and actually got to know him and some of the other brothers — Carl Wright, Jack Easton, Gigs Gamon — when I visited them with my friend Mark Attix at a lakeside resort where they were working. Ludlum saw to it that I pledged Alpha Delt, and a year later I did the same for Chip when he followed along to Wesleyan.
After that, it was OCS and a lengthy, if mysterious, career as a Cold Warrior, first in Naval Intelligence and, after Harvard Business School, in what he said was simply international business. Whatever it was, he and Ann traveled the world, in and out of London and Tokyo like commuters and coming to roost in hot spots like Nairobi and Cairo. Along the way, he earned the respect of many for his business acumen and the admiration of others for his cosmopolitan lifestyle. He loved the theater and the opera. He collected fine art as he journeyed around the world. He followed current events with considerable passion, and gave generously in support of his principles. He even ran for the local school board, won, and served until the “teachers’ union,” one of the objects of his sometimes vitriolic scorn, rose up and unseated him.
Stuart leaves no immediate survivors. His beloved Ann died three years ago; his own death occurred on what would have been their 53rd wedding anniversary. As he wished, there will be no funeral. His remains will go where he wanted — with Ann’s, on the waters of the Great South Bay.