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- [S24] article, New York Times, New York, NY, 3 May 2014, p. A17.
Anthony Drexel Duke, a scion of three of America’s wealthiest families who nearly 80years ago was prompted by a chance encounter to found what became Boys &Girls Harbor, an educational and social service agency that has helped tens of thousands of New York’s disadvantaged children, died on Wednesday in Gainesville, Fla. He was 95.
His death, from cancer, was announced by the agency. A resident most recently of Gainesville, Mr. Duke lived for many years in Brookhaven, a hamlet on Long Island’s South Shore.
Today, Boys & Girls Harbor, based in Harlem and serving young people mainly from that neighborhood and the South Bronx, comprises preschool and after-school programs, and a performing-arts conservatory offering classes in music, theater and dance.
The agency, which, Crain’s New York Business wrote in 2005, “may be one of New York’s great charities,” has served more than 50,000 children over the years. Many have gone on to college, and to professional careers in fields such as law,medicine and academia.
“What is special to this day about the Harbor is that for a significant number of us,it really became part of our identity,” Eduardo Padro, a New York State Supreme Court justice who attended the camp from 1966 to 1968 and who was later acounselor there, said in an interview on Friday. “You hear about Harvard men and Yale men — we are Harbor boys and girls now. We became entrenched in it,and it became entrenched in us.”
Descended from three American dynasties, Mr. Duke was reared “in a milieu of townhouses,country estates, private railroad cars and servants,” as The Saturday Evening Post wrote in 1955. Yet before he was out of his teens he had erected a summer camp for needy city children — the wellspring of Boys & Girls Harbor — on Long Island’s East End.
In 1915, when Mr. Duke’s parents were married in Philadelphia before 1,200 guests,their union made headlines for the fact that “one of the oldest and richest Philadelphia families was united with one of the richest families of the South,” as The New York Times reported.
The bride, 17-year-old Cordelia Drexel Biddle, was an offspring of the Drexels, who presided over a Philadelphia banking empire and founded Drexel University there, and the Biddles, bankers and landowners.
The groom, Angier Buchanan Duke, was a member of the family that had founded the American Tobacco Company in North Carolina in 1890 and later endowed what became Duke University. (The celebrated heiress Doris Duke was a cousin.)
Anthony Drexel Duke, the couple’s second child, had a fittingly lofty start in life. On July 28, 1918, Cordelia Duke, on an outing with her husband to Long Beach,N.Y., went into labor at the apex of a Ferris wheel. Descending, the couple raced to a nearby hospital, where Tony, as he was known ever after, made his entrance.
Despite its myriad advantages, Tony’s young life included great pain. His parents separated not long after he was born, divorcing in 1921. In 1923, when Tony was 5, his father drowned in a boating accident. With his mother and older brother,Tony moved from the family home in Manhattan to Cedarhurst, on Long Island. Hewas reared there and in Old Westbury, nearby.
In the summer of 1935, while a student at St. Paul’s School in Concord, N.H., Tony worked as a counselor at the camp for underprivileged boys that the school ranin the New Hampshire countryside. At summer’s end, he drove two of the campers,a pair of brothers, home to the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
With the boys, the sons of Russian immigrants, Tony climbed the sagging steps of their tenement. At the top, as he recalled long afterward, he confronted their tiny, drab apartment and their careworn mother, abandoned by her husband and with more children underfoot.
“As I descended the stairs, knowing I was heading back to my life of privilege and comfort, I felt unsettled,” Mr. Duke said in his 2007 memoir, “Uncharted Course,” written with Richard Firstman. “I sat in my car, watching swarms ofkids playing in the street and thinking of those boys upstairs.”
He determined to start his own camp for disadvantaged youth, and in 1937 Mr. Duke,then a 19-year-old Princeton undergraduate, established a tiny one — “six tents and 17 kids,” he later recalled — on Jessup’s Neck, overlooking Peconic Bay on Long Island.
The counselors, recruited from the ranks of his adolescent friends, included Claiborne Pell, the future Rhode Island senator; John V. Lindsay, the future New York mayor; and Paul Moore Jr., the future Episcopal bishop of New York.
Thecamp fell dormant in 1939, when Mr. Duke left Princeton to enlist in the Navy.After working as an attaché in Buenos Aires, he spent World WarII as the commander of a landing ship, serving at the Normandyinvasion and in the Pacific, earning three battle stars and a Bronze Star.
After the war, the camp, known in its early years as Boys Harbor, resumed operations,settling into its long-term home at Three Mile Harbor, near East Hampton, in 1954. That year, Mr. Duke established the organization’s social service arm in Manhattan, which offered campers year-round counseling and tutoring.
Though Mr. Duke held executive positions in several family companies, his existence until nearly the end of his life centered on Boys & Girls Harbor. For years, he personally interviewed prospective campers, who were referred by schools, churches and social service agencies in New York and Jersey City.
“Myguidance counselor said, ‘I’ve found this summer camp; it’s run by amillionaire, and it’s on the waterfront,’ ” said Justice Padro, who grewup in East Harlem. “Once she said ‘millionaire,’ I said, ‘Sign me up.’ ”
The integrated group of campers Mr. Duke assembled — black, white and Hispanic —eventually numbered several hundred a season.
“I’ve always worried,” he told The Times in 1986, “what would happen to our countryif too many people slipped out of the system. Too many human resources are not being used and people are feeling they’re being left out of the dream. We’ve found that children on the street have a dream. They reach out for what ever tools we can give.”
Mr.Duke, whose own children attended the camp, lived amid the campers each season,swimming and sailing with them, teaching them to tend livestock and grow vegetables, shepherding them to church on Sundays and kneeling with them for evening prayers. In later years, after campers beseeched him to offer a comparable experience for their sisters, facilities for girls were added.
Campers were encouraged to come to the Duke home, on the grounds of the camp, at any hour, to talk about anything they wished. “I don’t think that was good for my wives,” Mr. Duke, with rueful humor, told Newsday in 2007.
Mr.Duke’s first three marriages, to Alice Rutgers, Elizabeth Ordway and Diane Douglas, ended in divorce. His survivors include his fourth wife, the former Maria de Lourdes Alcebo, known as Luly, from whom he was separated; six sons, Anthony Drexel Jr., Nicholas Rutgers, John Ordway, Douglas Drexel, Washington Alcebo and James Buchanan; four daughters, Cordelia Duke Jung, Josephine Duke Brown, December Duke McSherry and Lulita Duke Reed; 22 grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren. Another son, Barclay Robertson Duke, committed suicide in 1989, at 28.
Mr.Duke’s elder brother, Angier Biddle Duke, a former United States ambassador to El Salvador, Denmark, Spain and Morocco, and a chief of protocol for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, died in 1995.
The camp at Three Mile Harbor no longer exists. Finding it too costly to maintain, Boys & Girls Harbor closed the property after the 2005 season. In 2011, the agency sold it to the town of East Hampton for $7.3 million.
In 2006, Justice Padro, a graduate of Yale and the New York University School of Law, attended a reunion of Boys Harbor alumni. Afterward, he was moved to visit the abandoned site of his old camp.
There,weeping, Justice Padro knelt and kissed the ground.
A version of this article appears in print on May 3, 2014, on page A17 of the New York edition with the headline:Anthony Drexel Duke, 95, Boys Harbor Founder, Dies.
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1918 - 2014 (95 years)
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