LAURANCE SPELMAN ROCKEFELLER
January 20, 1969
Laurance Rockefeller, citizen, philanthropist, and conservation leader, has with
extraordinary vision and leadership, focused the sights of his countrymen on the
quality of their physical environment--not just for today, but for countless
tomorrows. Quiet, patient, and persistent servant of the people, he has recalled
the wilderness and enriched the landscape and the lives of people. He is a
worthy member of a worthy family which has set an example for public service to
the country.
Seeking to save land along the Hudson River, Chairman of NY State Council of
Parks Laurance Spelman Rockefeller, speaks during a press conference in this
April 14, 1965 photo in New York. Rockefeller, a conservationist, philanthropist
and leading figure in the field of venture capital, died in his sleep Sunday
morning, July 11, 2004. He was 94.
Laurance Rockefeller, Venture Capitalist and Philanthropist, Dies at 94
July 11, 2004
Laurance Rockefeller, the middle brother of the five prominent and philanthropic
grandsons of John D. Rockefeller, who concentrated his own particular generosity
on conservation, recreation, ecological concerns and medical research,
particularly the treatment of cancer, died today at his home in Manhattan. He
was 94.
The cause of death was pulmonary fibrosis, according to a family spokesman,
Fraser P. Seitel.
Mr. Rockefeller's career began on Wall Street almost 70 years ago, where he
became a trailblazer of modern venture capitalism, compounding his inherited
wealth many times over. In the decades since he first took his seat on the New
York Stock Exchange, he often used his native instinct for identifying the next
big thing, not content simply to make more money but to make the money produce
something of lasting value.
In the late 1930's, he provided much of the capital to help Capt. Eddie
Rickenbacker, the World War I fighter pilot, start Eastern Airlines and was for
many years the airline's largest stockholder. He invested -- personally or
through a family partnership he established -- in hundreds of start-ups,
initially in aviation and electronics and later branching out to computers (Intel
and Apple) and biotechnology. His gifts of land, literally from the redwood
forests to the Virgin Islands, amounted to hundreds of thousands of acres,
including a prominent New York vista that includes a vast unspoiled tract along
the west bank of the lower Hudson River: Tallman Mountain State Park.
Less gregarious than his older brother Nelson, who was a four-term governor of
New York and the country's vice president under Gerald R. Ford, Laurance Spelman
Rockefeller was also more reserved and private then his flamboyant younger
brother Winthrop who was the governor of Arkansas. A philosophy major at
Princeton he had long wrestled with the question of how he might most
efficiently and satisfyingly use the great wealth to which he was born and which
he later kept compounding as a successful trailblazer of modern venture
capitalism.
In the process he shaped a life that was also distinct from that of his oldest
brother, John D. 3d, who devoted himself to maintaining the charitable efforts
established by his father and grandfather, and of his youngest brother, the
scholarly David, who headed the Chase bank and was deeply involved in issues of
international finance and politics.
In his biography "Laurance S. Rockefeller, Catalyst for Conservation," Robin
Winks, noted that there have been more than 200 books about the Rockefeller
family. He wrote: "One may read all these books, some friendly, some angry, to
discover that there is one Rockefeller who is barely present in most of them.
This is Laurance, who moves in and out for a page or so and is then gone,
neglected by an author who sometimes is in search of scandal or the stuff of
headlines, or whose interests are in politics, high finance, or international
affairs."
Mr. Winks concluded, "As a result, most of these books have neglected the
Rockefeller who, in the tradition of grandfather and father, arguably has moved
and shaken to the most long-range purpose -- the preservation of the nation's
natural heritage, of great historic landscapes. That preservation and the
resulting creation of a conservation ethic that is endurable, bipartisan, and
rooted in a consistent sense of values is a quieter but far more significant
achievement than much that is done in politics, education, or business. Laurance
Rockefeller chose this quieter path early in life."
Using significant amounts of his money as well as his connections and prestige
and negotiating skills he was instrumental in establishing and enlarging
National Parks in Wyoming, California, the Virgin Islands, Vermont, Maine and
Hawaii. In his home state of New York, he expended further cash and influence to
advocate and establish parklands and urban open spaces. In addition to the
things he helped, there were also developments he thwarted such as the
encroachment of high rise development to the Hudson Palisades north of the
George Washington Bridge. There, as an active member of the Palisade Interstate
Parkway Commission, he helped create a chain of parks that blocked the advance
of sprawl, thus maintaining the majestic view that he first saw as a child
looking out from Kykuit, the Rockefeller country home in Pocantico.
He served on dozens of other commissions, federal, state and local and he
advised every president since Dwight D. Eisenhower on policies of recreation,
wilderness, preservation and ecology. He founded the American Conservation
Association and supported scores of other environmental groups. In 1991, when
Laurance Rockefeller was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal he was extolled by
President George H. W. Bush as a "hidden national treasure." In his response he
declared that nothing was more important to him than "the creation of a
conservation ethic in America," and then pointedly and sternly admonished the
politicians in the room to do much more than they had to protect the country's
most valuable resources, the land, the water and the air.
His interest in nature and preservation extended beyond pro bono work to profit-seeking
business. As the founder of Rockresorts he helped design and construct hotels in
imposing natural settings from the Caribbean to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and
Hawaii always emphasizing close access to nature. These environmentally focused
hotels built between 1955 and 1969 contributed to the growth of what has since
become known as eco-tourism.
An unabashed apostle for the restorative powers of nature in an age of anxiety
and complexity, Mr. Rockefeller revealed an unusual mix of ingenuousness and
perhaps chutzpah when he wrote an article for the Readers Digest in 1976 titled,
"The Case for a Simpler Life." The author, who owned paintings by Bonnard and
Gainsborough, many large houses, his own plane, a Bentley among other cars, and
a 65-foot speed boat cited his family's view that waste was always sinful. "The
concept that we have boundless resources of materials, manpower and spirit and
therefore can waste, clearly no longer is true," he wrote. "Individually, people
are finding that a simpler life style provides greater satisfaction than
relentless pursuit of materialism." He wrote that in his case, "chopping and
splitting firewood" brought him spiritual and mental relaxation along with
exercise.
Mr. Rockefeller's commitment to wilderness, recreation and environmental
conservation had many roots. Since childhood he liked to ride horses through
unspoiled terrain. He was a passionate photographer in search of new landscapes.
As a young man he traveled to western National Parks. At Yellowstone, he met and
formed a lifetime friendship with Horace M. Albright, the park superintendent
who would become a driving force in the conservation movement and was one of Mr.
Rockefeller's two acknowledged mentors. The second of these was Fairfield Osborn,
a man who retired young from Wall Street to lead the New York Zoological Society
and who sounded the alarm of ecological threat in a book called "Our Plundered
Planet." Mr. Rockefeller referred to him affectionately as "a rogue elephant,"
rampaging against despoilers of the environment and in 1972 he wrote a sketch of
Mr. Osborn for The Reader's Digest that ran under the rubric of the magazine's
regular series, "My Most Unforgettable Character."
Even before Laurance reached adulthood the Rockefellers had included parks among
their many philanthropic projects. John D. Rockefeller Jr. had donated some of
his land on Mt. Desert island in Maine to help form Acadia, the country's first
national park in 1919 and ten years later he donated much larger tracts in
Wyoming to help establish Grand Teton National Park. But while significant such
projects were overshadowed by many of the family's better known endeavors in
education, race relations, religion and science. As a young man Mr. Rockefeller
grew steadily aware that the philanthropy of his generation would require
greater specialization than the eclectic approaches at of his immediate
ancestors. 'My grandfather gave like a forward pass,' he observed in an
interview with Then New York Times in 1966. 'He threw the ball out and it was up
to the others to make a go of it.' Then speaking of himself and his brothers, he
added, 'We feel you must give with the heart as well as the head. There must be
a deep personal commitment along with an intellectual understanding of the
project.'
Laurance Spelman Rockefeller was born on May 26, 1910, at a time when the health
of his grandmother Laura Celestia Spelman Rockefeller, known as Cettie, was
beginning to fail. It was to honor her that the boy's name was spelled unusually
with two a's. As Laurance matured he came to more closely resemble his
grandfather than did any other family member, having the same pursed and
seemingly dour expression that John D. Rockefeller often showed in photographs.
According to family accounts he was also the one who most closely revealed his
grandfather's flair for profitable deals. The three generations lived together
in New York City and Pocantico.
It was by all accounts an unusual childhood.
As a boy Laurance was a tinkerer, or as he later called himself, a gadgeteer. He
built and rode a wooden car that he hooked up to a small motor. He was closest
to Nelson, who was two years older, and the two called each other by the names
they preferred, Nelson answering to "Dick" and Laurance to "Bill." At one point
the two started raising rabbits, which they sold to scientific laboratories.
Along with their brothers they were paid for chores like cleaning shoes. The
compensation for swatting flies was 10 cents for 100.
Their school was an experimental and progressive academy called the Lincoln
School that was founded by John Dewey and devoted to a methodology of learning
by doing. Hobbies like Laurance's interest in photography were encouraged as was
travel and exploration. According to their father, things like spelling were
less stressed. Laurance and Nelson would often start off for school on roller
skates with a chauffeur following behind ready to drive them on the last leg of
the journey to Morningside Heights.
Laurance, his brothers, and their sister Abby, the oldest child of John D.
Rockefeller Jr., grew up in what was almost certainly the richest family in
America and yet frugality was a part of their upbringing. Their father regularly
reviewed the account books where his sons kept track of their expenditures just
as his own father had reviewed his own ledgers. John D. Jr. offered his sons
gifts of $2,500 if they would not smoke before they turned 21. Only David and
Nelson could claim the prize. In building Kykuit, the family had spent more
money on shaping the grounds than on the house, which had no ballroom or bar
since the Baptist family disparaged dancing and alcohol. Though Laurance was
raised amid advantages and luxury he was also exposed to the values of
asceticism and economy, emanating largely from the family's religious beliefs.
These held that their wealth should be thought of as belonging to God while
their own duty was to act as responsible stewards for these riches, making sure
that they were used most effectively and efficiently.
At Princeton which he entered in 1929, Laurance began challenging some of these
religious convictions drawn from the family. He said he felt as if he had "always
lived with a Bible in one hand," and he became a philosophy major in order to
determine whether faith or reason offered the best ways of identifying and
obtaining what was good. In the throes of his quest, while taking every
philosophy course Princeton offered, he wrote to his father, "I am of the
opinion that the appreciation and the desire for what is good takes more study
and insight than does the understanding and test for the best music and art." He
added that he wanted "to develop an independent and personal philosophy and
sense of value as a result of my own intuitions and insight." He struggled with
these themes and wrote his senior thesis on "The Concept of Value and Its
Relationship to Ethics." In it he concluded that faith and empiricism were both
essential. "It is the dropping off place of facts and values that the basic
religious experience is found."
After Princeton, Laurance headed for Harvard Law School but after two years he
realized he did not want to be a lawyer. Soon after in 1934 he married Mary
French, the sister of Nelson's roommate at Dartmouth and the granddaughter of
Frederick Billings, a president of the Northern Pacific Railroad.
The couple had three daughters and a son, all of whom survive. They are Laura R.
Chasin of Cambridge, Mass., Marion R. Weber of Stinson Beach, Calif., Dr. Lucy R.
Waletzky of Pleasantville, N.Y., and Larry Rockefeller of New York City. Mr.
Rockefeller is also survived by eight grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren.
His wife died in 1997.
Around the time of his marriage, Mr. Rockefeller turned to business. When his
grandfather died in 1937, he inherited the seat on the New York Stock Exchange
that the old man had bought in 1883.
But instead of accumulating blue chip holdings he began investigating embryonic
undertakings that while risky might yield life enhancing consequences as well as
profit. One of his first such efforts came about when he and his bride while
furnishing there first home were shown photographs of curved wooden furniture
designed by Alvar Aalto, the Finnish architect. The couple ordered a number of
pieces for themselves but Laurance ordered many more concluding that Aalto's
work would attract buyers as an example of good modern design that was also
affordable. Ignoring the furniture experts who warned him against it, he opened
a store on 53d Street to sell the Finnish furniture. The store did well until
1940 when the Finland's Winter War prevented further imports.
A second venture was to have much greater consequences. Mr. Rockefeller had
become friendly with Captain Rickenbacker, who had triumphed in so many dog
fights over Europe. Laurance had himself learned to fly and he found Mr.
Rickenbacker's visionary accounts of an approaching boom in commercial air
travel to be persuasive. Within a decade after Mr. Rockefeller's considerable
investment, Eastern had become the most profitable airline to emerge after the
war.
"Aviation more or less knocked at my door," Mr. Rockefeller once commented
referring specifically to a day in 1939 when he first met J. S. McDonnell Jr.,
an engineer who had a small engineering shop in St. Louis. "He walked in with a
briefcase which almost literally contained all there was to McDonnell Aircraft
Corporation." Mr. Rockefeller bought his first shares in the company when it had
not yet produced a single plane, spending $10,000. Once again within a decade he
would become one of the major shareholders in the company that was quickly
turning into a leading supplier of military aircraft.
During the war Mr. Rockefeller froze and suspended his investing while serving
as a Naval officer working on procurement. But once peace was established he
returned to searching for start-up opportunities. In 1959, an article in The
Wall Street Journal noted that Mr. Rockefeller has "no thought of abandoning his
20-year-old policy of using his wealth as `venture capital' on untried new
enterprises." Presumably the quotes around the words venture capital were meant
to suggest that the term and the concept were then still novel.
The Journal article reported that since the end of the war, Mr. Rockefeller had
invested about $8,750,000 in some two dozen companies noting that by the end of
1958 these investments had grown to be worth more than $28 million. The article
pointed out that had Mr. Rockefeller left the investment stake in the oil shares
he had inherited that portion of his legacy would have risen to $23.5 million.
"When you consider the risks involved, we haven't done so much better," said Mr.
Rockefeller. "But we do feel gratified because of the contributions we made in
areas which other types of capital neglected." In the course of his pursuit of
trends Mr. Rockefeller sought out not only experts in science and technology but
also figures like the medical missionary Albert Schweitzer, Alan Watts, the
Asian scholar, and Joseph Campbell, the student of myths. He also consulted with
people who took seriously the possibility of extra-terrestrial life and
supported some of their research.
As Mr. Rockefeller kept finding ground-floor opportunities, that included such
lucrative start-ups as Piasecki Helicopter, Reaction Motors which produced
engines for rockets and missiles, Itek, which pioneered in reconnaissance
photography, his brothers and his sister would from to time join in particular
investments. In 1969 Laurance formalized these activities by establishing
Venrock Associates, an investment company that was a limited partnership
financed by members of the Rockefeller family and a number of the institutions
with which the family had long standing philanthropic ties, among them the
Museum of Modern Art, Rockefeller University and Memorial Sloan- Kettering
Hospital.
By 1996 Venrock had financed 221 initiatives at early stages of their
development, amassing an impressive performance record. After Mr. Rockefeller's
early concentration on aviation, he steadily branched out into electronics,
computation and biotechnology, lucratively providing early capital companies
like Intel and Apple long before they became widely known and highly valued.
According to Mr. Winks, the biographer, through his investments Mr. Rockefeller
"increased his personal fortune many times over." In his book he observed: "Business
historians praise Laurance Rockefeller, possibly more than any other figure in
the venture capital industry, for his pioneering in early stage technology-based
enterprises. Though he was fascinated by technology, he was also interested in "the
social purposefulness."
Though his business pursuits were hardly devoid of passion, it was his desire to
simultaneously protect the wonders of nature while providing greater access to
them that aroused his greatest enthusiasms. In 1939 he was first named a member
of the Palisades Parkway Commission and in 1942 he made his first gift of land
providing the tract that is now Tallman Mountain State Park on the west bank of
the lower Hudson. In 1949 Mr. Rockefeller signed over more the 30,000 acres that
his father had assembled at Jackson Hole to the federal government. Within five
years he had built three lodges offering visitors comfortable accommodations
abutting the Grand Teton National Park. By 1960 he became vice chairman of the
New York State Council of Parks under Robert Moses, the politically astute
master builder, from whom he learned lessons in getting things done.
In 1952, while cruising in the Caribbean with his wife, he put in at Caneel Bay,
a cove fringed with frangipani, bougainvillea and monkey-no-climb trees on St.
John's, the smallest and most unspoiled of the American Virgin Islands. Over the
next four years he bought land eventually assembling an area of 50,000 acres
that he turned over to the Park Service as the Virgin Islands National Park.
From 1958 to 1962 he served as chairman of the Outdoor Recreation Review
Commission that President Eisenhower appointed to study the country's recreation
needs for the year 2000. Many of the report's recommendations for the
designation of new parks and the expansion of old ones were enacted,
particularly during the Johnson administration.
As the middle son Mr. Rockefeller had long experience in promoting compromise.
David Rockefeller has described in his "Memoirs' how Laurance repeatedly sought
to ease tensions between David and Nelson as they squabbled over who should be
chairman of Rockefeller Brothers and what should be done with the family estate
in Pocantico. In public policy disputes, Mr. Rockefeller also often took up the
role of mediator.
In the mid-1960's President Lyndon B. Johnson asked Mr. Rockefeller to push
forward a long-stalled plan for a Redwoods National Park in California that had
first been suggested in 1917. Naturalists led by the Sierra Club were insisting
that the envisioned park be mapped to include the largest possible area of giant
trees while the lumber companies and state politicians countered with proposal
of much smaller acreage, Mr. Rockefeller engineered a compromise with the state
of California that failed to please many. Instead of the 77,000 acres that the
Sierra Club had sought the Redwoods park that was established in 1968 contained
58,000 acres. It was the costliest park in United States history with $1.5
billion spent on land alone and hundreds of millions more going to displaced
lumbermen. In time the recognition grew that if not for Mr. Rockefeller's
compromise there would have would be no park at all.
Another controversy concerned Mr. Rockefeller's effort to have New York's huge
Adirondack Park, the largest state park in the country, be put under federal
control as a National Park. Starting in 1961 Mr. Rockefeller commissioned a
series of studies that suggested that turning the park, which is the size of
Vermont, over to the National Park Service would be the most effective way to
reverse commercial incursions by timber companies and others, since federal
regulations on land use were more stringent than those of the state. The
opposition of local residents and politicians ultimately swamped the idea but Mr.
Rockefeller's continued emphasis on the park's importance has been credited with
reversing years of neglect, deterioration and exploitation as the state
government asserted greater control.
It was at Caneel Bay that Mr. Rockefeller opened the first of his Rockresorts in
1956, seeking to test his belief that there could be an alliance between
commerce and conservation. In designing the place he determined that his guests
were to swim, snorkel, sleep, eat well but not luxuriously and take nature walks,
There would be no telephones, no air conditioning and no tipping. Mr.
Rockefeller relaxed some of these restrictions as he built and operated other
resorts among them the Dorado Beach Hotel in Puerto Rico, Little Dix Bay in the
British Virgin Islands and the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel in Hawaii. In 1985 he
divested himself of the Rockresorts, adhering to his investment principles he
outlines when he set up Venrock: in on the ground floor, stay with the
enterprise until it reaches maturity, then get out and move to something else."
January 20, 1969
Laurance Rockefeller, citizen, philanthropist, and conservation leader, has with
extraordinary vision and leadership, focused the sights of his countrymen on the
quality of their physical environment--not just for today, but for countless
tomorrows. Quiet, patient, and persistent servant of the people, he has recalled
the wilderness and enriched the landscape and the lives of people. He is a
worthy member of a worthy family which has set an example for public service to
the country.
Seeking to save land along the Hudson River, Chairman of NY State Council of
Parks Laurance Spelman Rockefeller, speaks during a press conference in this
April 14, 1965 photo in New York. Rockefeller, a conservationist, philanthropist
and leading figure in the field of venture capital, died in his sleep Sunday
morning, July 11, 2004. He was 94.
Laurance Rockefeller, Venture Capitalist and Philanthropist, Dies at 94
July 11, 2004
Laurance Rockefeller, the middle brother of the five prominent and philanthropic
grandsons of John D. Rockefeller, who concentrated his own particular generosity
on conservation, recreation, ecological concerns and medical research,
particularly the treatment of cancer, died today at his home in Manhattan. He
was 94.
The cause of death was pulmonary fibrosis, according to a family spokesman,
Fraser P. Seitel.
Mr. Rockefeller's career began on Wall Street almost 70 years ago, where he
became a trailblazer of modern venture capitalism, compounding his inherited
wealth many times over. In the decades since he first took his seat on the New
York Stock Exchange, he often used his native instinct for identifying the next
big thing, not content simply to make more money but to make the money produce
something of lasting value.
In the late 1930's, he provided much of the capital to help Capt. Eddie
Rickenbacker, the World War I fighter pilot, start Eastern Airlines and was for
many years the airline's largest stockholder. He invested -- personally or
through a family partnership he established -- in hundreds of start-ups,
initially in aviation and electronics and later branching out to computers (Intel
and Apple) and biotechnology. His gifts of land, literally from the redwood
forests to the Virgin Islands, amounted to hundreds of thousands of acres,
including a prominent New York vista that includes a vast unspoiled tract along
the west bank of the lower Hudson River: Tallman Mountain State Park.
Less gregarious than his older brother Nelson, who was a four-term governor of
New York and the country's vice president under Gerald R. Ford, Laurance Spelman
Rockefeller was also more reserved and private then his flamboyant younger
brother Winthrop who was the governor of Arkansas. A philosophy major at
Princeton he had long wrestled with the question of how he might most
efficiently and satisfyingly use the great wealth to which he was born and which
he later kept compounding as a successful trailblazer of modern venture
capitalism.
In the process he shaped a life that was also distinct from that of his oldest
brother, John D. 3d, who devoted himself to maintaining the charitable efforts
established by his father and grandfather, and of his youngest brother, the
scholarly David, who headed the Chase bank and was deeply involved in issues of
international finance and politics.
In his biography "Laurance S. Rockefeller, Catalyst for Conservation," Robin
Winks, noted that there have been more than 200 books about the Rockefeller
family. He wrote: "One may read all these books, some friendly, some angry, to
discover that there is one Rockefeller who is barely present in most of them.
This is Laurance, who moves in and out for a page or so and is then gone,
neglected by an author who sometimes is in search of scandal or the stuff of
headlines, or whose interests are in politics, high finance, or international
affairs."
Mr. Winks concluded, "As a result, most of these books have neglected the
Rockefeller who, in the tradition of grandfather and father, arguably has moved
and shaken to the most long-range purpose -- the preservation of the nation's
natural heritage, of great historic landscapes. That preservation and the
resulting creation of a conservation ethic that is endurable, bipartisan, and
rooted in a consistent sense of values is a quieter but far more significant
achievement than much that is done in politics, education, or business. Laurance
Rockefeller chose this quieter path early in life."
Using significant amounts of his money as well as his connections and prestige
and negotiating skills he was instrumental in establishing and enlarging
National Parks in Wyoming, California, the Virgin Islands, Vermont, Maine and
Hawaii. In his home state of New York, he expended further cash and influence to
advocate and establish parklands and urban open spaces. In addition to the
things he helped, there were also developments he thwarted such as the
encroachment of high rise development to the Hudson Palisades north of the
George Washington Bridge. There, as an active member of the Palisade Interstate
Parkway Commission, he helped create a chain of parks that blocked the advance
of sprawl, thus maintaining the majestic view that he first saw as a child
looking out from Kykuit, the Rockefeller country home in Pocantico.
He served on dozens of other commissions, federal, state and local and he
advised every president since Dwight D. Eisenhower on policies of recreation,
wilderness, preservation and ecology. He founded the American Conservation
Association and supported scores of other environmental groups. In 1991, when
Laurance Rockefeller was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal he was extolled by
President George H. W. Bush as a "hidden national treasure." In his response he
declared that nothing was more important to him than "the creation of a
conservation ethic in America," and then pointedly and sternly admonished the
politicians in the room to do much more than they had to protect the country's
most valuable resources, the land, the water and the air.
His interest in nature and preservation extended beyond pro bono work to profit-seeking
business. As the founder of Rockresorts he helped design and construct hotels in
imposing natural settings from the Caribbean to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and
Hawaii always emphasizing close access to nature. These environmentally focused
hotels built between 1955 and 1969 contributed to the growth of what has since
become known as eco-tourism.
An unabashed apostle for the restorative powers of nature in an age of anxiety
and complexity, Mr. Rockefeller revealed an unusual mix of ingenuousness and
perhaps chutzpah when he wrote an article for the Readers Digest in 1976 titled,
"The Case for a Simpler Life." The author, who owned paintings by Bonnard and
Gainsborough, many large houses, his own plane, a Bentley among other cars, and
a 65-foot speed boat cited his family's view that waste was always sinful. "The
concept that we have boundless resources of materials, manpower and spirit and
therefore can waste, clearly no longer is true," he wrote. "Individually, people
are finding that a simpler life style provides greater satisfaction than
relentless pursuit of materialism." He wrote that in his case, "chopping and
splitting firewood" brought him spiritual and mental relaxation along with
exercise.
Mr. Rockefeller's commitment to wilderness, recreation and environmental
conservation had many roots. Since childhood he liked to ride horses through
unspoiled terrain. He was a passionate photographer in search of new landscapes.
As a young man he traveled to western National Parks. At Yellowstone, he met and
formed a lifetime friendship with Horace M. Albright, the park superintendent
who would become a driving force in the conservation movement and was one of Mr.
Rockefeller's two acknowledged mentors. The second of these was Fairfield Osborn,
a man who retired young from Wall Street to lead the New York Zoological Society
and who sounded the alarm of ecological threat in a book called "Our Plundered
Planet." Mr. Rockefeller referred to him affectionately as "a rogue elephant,"
rampaging against despoilers of the environment and in 1972 he wrote a sketch of
Mr. Osborn for The Reader's Digest that ran under the rubric of the magazine's
regular series, "My Most Unforgettable Character."
Even before Laurance reached adulthood the Rockefellers had included parks among
their many philanthropic projects. John D. Rockefeller Jr. had donated some of
his land on Mt. Desert island in Maine to help form Acadia, the country's first
national park in 1919 and ten years later he donated much larger tracts in
Wyoming to help establish Grand Teton National Park. But while significant such
projects were overshadowed by many of the family's better known endeavors in
education, race relations, religion and science. As a young man Mr. Rockefeller
grew steadily aware that the philanthropy of his generation would require
greater specialization than the eclectic approaches at of his immediate
ancestors. 'My grandfather gave like a forward pass,' he observed in an
interview with Then New York Times in 1966. 'He threw the ball out and it was up
to the others to make a go of it.' Then speaking of himself and his brothers, he
added, 'We feel you must give with the heart as well as the head. There must be
a deep personal commitment along with an intellectual understanding of the
project.'
Laurance Spelman Rockefeller was born on May 26, 1910, at a time when the health
of his grandmother Laura Celestia Spelman Rockefeller, known as Cettie, was
beginning to fail. It was to honor her that the boy's name was spelled unusually
with two a's. As Laurance matured he came to more closely resemble his
grandfather than did any other family member, having the same pursed and
seemingly dour expression that John D. Rockefeller often showed in photographs.
According to family accounts he was also the one who most closely revealed his
grandfather's flair for profitable deals. The three generations lived together
in New York City and Pocantico.
It was by all accounts an unusual childhood.
As a boy Laurance was a tinkerer, or as he later called himself, a gadgeteer. He
built and rode a wooden car that he hooked up to a small motor. He was closest
to Nelson, who was two years older, and the two called each other by the names
they preferred, Nelson answering to "Dick" and Laurance to "Bill." At one point
the two started raising rabbits, which they sold to scientific laboratories.
Along with their brothers they were paid for chores like cleaning shoes. The
compensation for swatting flies was 10 cents for 100.
Their school was an experimental and progressive academy called the Lincoln
School that was founded by John Dewey and devoted to a methodology of learning
by doing. Hobbies like Laurance's interest in photography were encouraged as was
travel and exploration. According to their father, things like spelling were
less stressed. Laurance and Nelson would often start off for school on roller
skates with a chauffeur following behind ready to drive them on the last leg of
the journey to Morningside Heights.
Laurance, his brothers, and their sister Abby, the oldest child of John D.
Rockefeller Jr., grew up in what was almost certainly the richest family in
America and yet frugality was a part of their upbringing. Their father regularly
reviewed the account books where his sons kept track of their expenditures just
as his own father had reviewed his own ledgers. John D. Jr. offered his sons
gifts of $2,500 if they would not smoke before they turned 21. Only David and
Nelson could claim the prize. In building Kykuit, the family had spent more
money on shaping the grounds than on the house, which had no ballroom or bar
since the Baptist family disparaged dancing and alcohol. Though Laurance was
raised amid advantages and luxury he was also exposed to the values of
asceticism and economy, emanating largely from the family's religious beliefs.
These held that their wealth should be thought of as belonging to God while
their own duty was to act as responsible stewards for these riches, making sure
that they were used most effectively and efficiently.
At Princeton which he entered in 1929, Laurance began challenging some of these
religious convictions drawn from the family. He said he felt as if he had "always
lived with a Bible in one hand," and he became a philosophy major in order to
determine whether faith or reason offered the best ways of identifying and
obtaining what was good. In the throes of his quest, while taking every
philosophy course Princeton offered, he wrote to his father, "I am of the
opinion that the appreciation and the desire for what is good takes more study
and insight than does the understanding and test for the best music and art." He
added that he wanted "to develop an independent and personal philosophy and
sense of value as a result of my own intuitions and insight." He struggled with
these themes and wrote his senior thesis on "The Concept of Value and Its
Relationship to Ethics." In it he concluded that faith and empiricism were both
essential. "It is the dropping off place of facts and values that the basic
religious experience is found."
After Princeton, Laurance headed for Harvard Law School but after two years he
realized he did not want to be a lawyer. Soon after in 1934 he married Mary
French, the sister of Nelson's roommate at Dartmouth and the granddaughter of
Frederick Billings, a president of the Northern Pacific Railroad.
The couple had three daughters and a son, all of whom survive. They are Laura R.
Chasin of Cambridge, Mass., Marion R. Weber of Stinson Beach, Calif., Dr. Lucy R.
Waletzky of Pleasantville, N.Y., and Larry Rockefeller of New York City. Mr.
Rockefeller is also survived by eight grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren.
His wife died in 1997.
Around the time of his marriage, Mr. Rockefeller turned to business. When his
grandfather died in 1937, he inherited the seat on the New York Stock Exchange
that the old man had bought in 1883.
But instead of accumulating blue chip holdings he began investigating embryonic
undertakings that while risky might yield life enhancing consequences as well as
profit. One of his first such efforts came about when he and his bride while
furnishing there first home were shown photographs of curved wooden furniture
designed by Alvar Aalto, the Finnish architect. The couple ordered a number of
pieces for themselves but Laurance ordered many more concluding that Aalto's
work would attract buyers as an example of good modern design that was also
affordable. Ignoring the furniture experts who warned him against it, he opened
a store on 53d Street to sell the Finnish furniture. The store did well until
1940 when the Finland's Winter War prevented further imports.
A second venture was to have much greater consequences. Mr. Rockefeller had
become friendly with Captain Rickenbacker, who had triumphed in so many dog
fights over Europe. Laurance had himself learned to fly and he found Mr.
Rickenbacker's visionary accounts of an approaching boom in commercial air
travel to be persuasive. Within a decade after Mr. Rockefeller's considerable
investment, Eastern had become the most profitable airline to emerge after the
war.
"Aviation more or less knocked at my door," Mr. Rockefeller once commented
referring specifically to a day in 1939 when he first met J. S. McDonnell Jr.,
an engineer who had a small engineering shop in St. Louis. "He walked in with a
briefcase which almost literally contained all there was to McDonnell Aircraft
Corporation." Mr. Rockefeller bought his first shares in the company when it had
not yet produced a single plane, spending $10,000. Once again within a decade he
would become one of the major shareholders in the company that was quickly
turning into a leading supplier of military aircraft.
During the war Mr. Rockefeller froze and suspended his investing while serving
as a Naval officer working on procurement. But once peace was established he
returned to searching for start-up opportunities. In 1959, an article in The
Wall Street Journal noted that Mr. Rockefeller has "no thought of abandoning his
20-year-old policy of using his wealth as `venture capital' on untried new
enterprises." Presumably the quotes around the words venture capital were meant
to suggest that the term and the concept were then still novel.
The Journal article reported that since the end of the war, Mr. Rockefeller had
invested about $8,750,000 in some two dozen companies noting that by the end of
1958 these investments had grown to be worth more than $28 million. The article
pointed out that had Mr. Rockefeller left the investment stake in the oil shares
he had inherited that portion of his legacy would have risen to $23.5 million.
"When you consider the risks involved, we haven't done so much better," said Mr.
Rockefeller. "But we do feel gratified because of the contributions we made in
areas which other types of capital neglected." In the course of his pursuit of
trends Mr. Rockefeller sought out not only experts in science and technology but
also figures like the medical missionary Albert Schweitzer, Alan Watts, the
Asian scholar, and Joseph Campbell, the student of myths. He also consulted with
people who took seriously the possibility of extra-terrestrial life and
supported some of their research.
As Mr. Rockefeller kept finding ground-floor opportunities, that included such
lucrative start-ups as Piasecki Helicopter, Reaction Motors which produced
engines for rockets and missiles, Itek, which pioneered in reconnaissance
photography, his brothers and his sister would from to time join in particular
investments. In 1969 Laurance formalized these activities by establishing
Venrock Associates, an investment company that was a limited partnership
financed by members of the Rockefeller family and a number of the institutions
with which the family had long standing philanthropic ties, among them the
Museum of Modern Art, Rockefeller University and Memorial Sloan- Kettering
Hospital.
By 1996 Venrock had financed 221 initiatives at early stages of their
development, amassing an impressive performance record. After Mr. Rockefeller's
early concentration on aviation, he steadily branched out into electronics,
computation and biotechnology, lucratively providing early capital companies
like Intel and Apple long before they became widely known and highly valued.
According to Mr. Winks, the biographer, through his investments Mr. Rockefeller
"increased his personal fortune many times over." In his book he observed: "Business
historians praise Laurance Rockefeller, possibly more than any other figure in
the venture capital industry, for his pioneering in early stage technology-based
enterprises. Though he was fascinated by technology, he was also interested in "the
social purposefulness."
Though his business pursuits were hardly devoid of passion, it was his desire to
simultaneously protect the wonders of nature while providing greater access to
them that aroused his greatest enthusiasms. In 1939 he was first named a member
of the Palisades Parkway Commission and in 1942 he made his first gift of land
providing the tract that is now Tallman Mountain State Park on the west bank of
the lower Hudson. In 1949 Mr. Rockefeller signed over more the 30,000 acres that
his father had assembled at Jackson Hole to the federal government. Within five
years he had built three lodges offering visitors comfortable accommodations
abutting the Grand Teton National Park. By 1960 he became vice chairman of the
New York State Council of Parks under Robert Moses, the politically astute
master builder, from whom he learned lessons in getting things done.
In 1952, while cruising in the Caribbean with his wife, he put in at Caneel Bay,
a cove fringed with frangipani, bougainvillea and monkey-no-climb trees on St.
John's, the smallest and most unspoiled of the American Virgin Islands. Over the
next four years he bought land eventually assembling an area of 50,000 acres
that he turned over to the Park Service as the Virgin Islands National Park.
From 1958 to 1962 he served as chairman of the Outdoor Recreation Review
Commission that President Eisenhower appointed to study the country's recreation
needs for the year 2000. Many of the report's recommendations for the
designation of new parks and the expansion of old ones were enacted,
particularly during the Johnson administration.
As the middle son Mr. Rockefeller had long experience in promoting compromise.
David Rockefeller has described in his "Memoirs' how Laurance repeatedly sought
to ease tensions between David and Nelson as they squabbled over who should be
chairman of Rockefeller Brothers and what should be done with the family estate
in Pocantico. In public policy disputes, Mr. Rockefeller also often took up the
role of mediator.
In the mid-1960's President Lyndon B. Johnson asked Mr. Rockefeller to push
forward a long-stalled plan for a Redwoods National Park in California that had
first been suggested in 1917. Naturalists led by the Sierra Club were insisting
that the envisioned park be mapped to include the largest possible area of giant
trees while the lumber companies and state politicians countered with proposal
of much smaller acreage, Mr. Rockefeller engineered a compromise with the state
of California that failed to please many. Instead of the 77,000 acres that the
Sierra Club had sought the Redwoods park that was established in 1968 contained
58,000 acres. It was the costliest park in United States history with $1.5
billion spent on land alone and hundreds of millions more going to displaced
lumbermen. In time the recognition grew that if not for Mr. Rockefeller's
compromise there would have would be no park at all.
Another controversy concerned Mr. Rockefeller's effort to have New York's huge
Adirondack Park, the largest state park in the country, be put under federal
control as a National Park. Starting in 1961 Mr. Rockefeller commissioned a
series of studies that suggested that turning the park, which is the size of
Vermont, over to the National Park Service would be the most effective way to
reverse commercial incursions by timber companies and others, since federal
regulations on land use were more stringent than those of the state. The
opposition of local residents and politicians ultimately swamped the idea but Mr.
Rockefeller's continued emphasis on the park's importance has been credited with
reversing years of neglect, deterioration and exploitation as the state
government asserted greater control.
It was at Caneel Bay that Mr. Rockefeller opened the first of his Rockresorts in
1956, seeking to test his belief that there could be an alliance between
commerce and conservation. In designing the place he determined that his guests
were to swim, snorkel, sleep, eat well but not luxuriously and take nature walks,
There would be no telephones, no air conditioning and no tipping. Mr.
Rockefeller relaxed some of these restrictions as he built and operated other
resorts among them the Dorado Beach Hotel in Puerto Rico, Little Dix Bay in the
British Virgin Islands and the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel in Hawaii. In 1985 he
divested himself of the Rockresorts, adhering to his investment principles he
outlines when he set up Venrock: in on the ground floor, stay with the
enterprise until it reaches maturity, then get out and move to something else."