"Stokley Towles, 77; broadened investment banking" by Bryan Marquard | Globe Staff, March 03, 2013
Stokley Towles ran circles around Boston’s staid financial world four decades ago when he persuaded his firm, Brown Brothers Harriman, to venture into the relatively unexplored realm known as global custody....
Building an expansive operation from his idea, Brown Brothers Harriman now handles the settlement and safekeeping of investments and assets, such as bonds and equities in transactions that cross international borders, and currently reports more than $3 trillion in assets under custody.
Mr. Towles, whose public and private philanthropy extended from education to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, died in his Westwood home Feb. 14 after having lunch with a good friend....
In the early 1970s, global custody “was a backwater,” said Digger Donahue, managing partner at Brown Brothers Harriman. “It wasn’t really a big glamorous thing for banks to be doing.”
Mr. Towles helped change that, partly through the force of his personality.
“He was not a typical banker,” Donahue said. “He just had more energy and exuberance, and he translated that into building a business.”
That exuberance was apparent in other avenues he pursued, particularly at the Museum of Fine Arts. The MFA named a gallery in the Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art for Mr. Towles and his wife, Jeanne, who jointly established a fund for acquiring pieces of art.
Mr. Towles was particularly fond of artists such as Andy Warhol and Alex Katz. He also was drawn to brightly colored works that seemed to capture his own unyielding sense of optimism.
“He found an interest in art truly life-enhancing,” said Malcolm Rogers, director of the MFA. “It added a dimension that meant a great deal to him.”
Related(?): The Mossad Moles at Harvard
Mossad Agent Behind Art Heists
The Gardner Gambit
I'll bet they do know who has them now, and you can see why my
newspaper is so interested in art. It's a cover for spies.
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“My dad was always interested in getting to know a whole new group of people,” said his son Amor of New York City. “He just kept going after new and widening circles of engagement, right up until the time he died.”
At gatherings of all kinds, “it was always such fun to be next to Dad,” said his daughter, Kimbrough of New York City. “He had such a love of life and told such great stories and was so full of laughter that you just wanted to be with him.”
Born in St. Louis, Stokley Porter Towles was the older of two children and was studying at Princeton University when his father died. Scholarships helped him finish at Princeton, an experience that prompted him to use his own financial success to help others.
He was a good banker, not like the kind we have now?
Privately and without fanfare, he lent assistance to friends, acquaintances, and colleagues who wanted to further their educations or return to college.
“There was his career and his job, which was huge, but then there was his work for other people,” said his son Stokley Jr. of Seattle. “He loved helping people with education.”
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“He was extraordinarily optimistic, almost unnaturally so,” said Richard H. Baker, former headmaster of the school. “Stokley felt that anything he wanted to get done, or anything we wanted to get done, we could get done. I relished being around him because it buoyed me up. He would never have suggested that he could do things that were superhuman. It just seemed that things were easy for him.”
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Mr. Towles graduated from Harvard Business School with a master’s in business administration before joining Brown Brothers Harriman in 1960. He stayed with the firm the rest of his life, becoming a partner in 1978 and a limited partner in 2010.
Global custody, the pursuit Mr. Towles suggested, became the biggest part of the firm’s business, now employing about 3,000 people worldwide.
In 1983, he married Jeanne Glass, who said via e-mail that Mr. Towles “was the love of my life and the best husband in the world and the most loving person, and the most fun.”
During family vacations on Martha’s Vineyard, Mr. Towles would stuff his two-seat turquoise Porsche with any number of children, stepchildren, and their friends for a ride to get ice cream. Driving down the road, his car spilling over with passengers, he would slow down while passing pedestrians to cheerfully call out: “Hey, want a ride?”
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For Mr. Towles, a list of life’s enthusiasms included faithful Sunday attendance at Episcopal services, chardonnay, and the kind of common sense that laid a foundation for his optimism.
He also was a fan of TV shows such as “The Rockford Files,” “Seinfeld,” and “Cheers,” from which he drew life parables, invoking the characters Sam and Diane, for example, during heart-to-heart talks about the complications of romance.
Routines became rituals to relish. Mr. Towles began the day with corn flakes, said grace before meals, exercised daily, and had chicken soup on weekends.
And he stopped by the Faneuil Hall Starbucks each morning for a double-shot tall skim latte, greeting baristas by name before watching Boston come to life.
“For 20 or 30 years, he would get coffee at Faneuil Hall and go sit outside on a bench,” Amor said....
That's what crazy old homeless bums do, but I gue$$ he wasn't a bum.
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Movin' on up:
"Brown Brothers moving to Post Office Square; Deal is latest to boost Financial District" by Casey Ross | Globe Staff, January 08, 2013
Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., the oldest privately held financial institution in the country, is moving to a historic building in Boston’s Financial District.
An executive with Brown Brothers, which provides investment management, corporate banking, and advisory services, said the new offices will consolidate its Boston employees in a single location and give the firm room to grow. The company’s local operations are currently housed in buildings on Milk, Franklin, and Water streets.
“We decided to stick with our roots and stay in downtown Boston,” said Douglas “Digger” Donahue, managing partner of Brown Brothers. He said the firm considered four or five other real estate options, including some properties in the suburbs, but preferred to remain part of a downtown area that is undergoing something of a renaissance.
The Financial District itself has attracted a number of new office tenants in recent months, including the online payment giant PayPal, Partners HealthCare, and several technology and digital communications firms....
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That's odd; nothing about their connections to financing Nazi Germany. Considering how often I see that reference in my paper, that is strange.
Also related: How The Bush Family Made Its Fortune From The Nazis
Always must consider the source. This is not to say the Bushes were great guys; they were not, they were/are war criminals, and they are also a family criminal syndicate when you consider their holdings and dealings; however, it is strange that certain roles and connections are eliminated from the general media narrative regarding that infamous man and the nationalistic movement he led.
