Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 11, 1995 TAG: 9506300010
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
In a Boston Brahmin society where it has been said that the Lowells speak only to the Cabots and the Cabots speak only to God, Thomas Dudley Cabot served on so many boards, belonged to so many lunch clubs and had so many irons in the fire that he had neither the time nor the inclination to snub anybody.
Since 1960, when he relinquished active control of the Cabot Corp., the family chemical company he had built into a multinational behemoth, he had made it a point to speak regularly and forcefully to just about anybody who might be persuaded to join him in giving money to charity.
Among other things, Cabot, a 1919 Harvard graduate, endowed a dozen Harvard chairs and served for years on the governing boards of Harvard, Radcliffe, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
A passionate, if somewhat impatient, man who pursued his interests vigorously, Cabot loved the outdoors and became an ardent conservationist.
In 1939, for example, he led an expedition to explore and map mountains in Colombia. When he was in his 80s he lost the sight of an eye in a cross-country skiing accident, but retained his enthusiasm for the active life. As recently as a year ago, he and his wife, who recently celebrated their 75th anniversary, were tramping the mountains of Colorado.
Cabot, who stayed in shape by sawing his own wood, was also at home on the water. An avid canoeist who once wrote a guide to New England rivers and helped develop the first practical aluminum canoe, he was also an inveterate yachtsman.
An engineer by training, Cabot liked to match wits with Nobel prize winners and other luminaries during his weekly lunches at the Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, but he could poke fun at his own foibles, like the time he set sail without checking the weather and headed into a hurricane.
Another close call had a profound effect. When one of his young sons almost drowned off the coast of Maine after his father left him untended on deck, Cabot was so remorseful and so relieved that he vowed to preserve Maine's outer islands, eventually acquiring some 50 small islets and establishing foundations to keep them unspoiled.
His diverse life included a stint of government service. As director of international security affairs in the State Department in 1951, Cabot supervised the disbursement of $6 billion in foreign and military aid. His younger brother, John Moors Cabot, served as an ambassador to five nations from 1954 to 1965.
In one of the more curious episodes of his business life, Cabot, a long-time director of the United Fruit Co., became its president in 1948, but resigned abruptly in 1949.
``He became president because he wanted to reform it,'' his son Louis said on Friday, noting that the company had been widely considered a corrupting influence in Central America. ``The bureaucracy was so entrenched, he was too impatient to wait years for his reforms to work their way through.''
Cabot was born in Cambridge to a renowned Boston family, or rather several. His ancestors included Lowells, and he was a seventh generation descendant of John Cabot, who came to Boston from the Isle of Jersey in 1700 and founded a line of seagoing merchants who traded in everything from opium to slaves and later served as privateers harassing British vessels in the Revolutionary War before settling into genteel respectability in the 19th century.
Cabot's father, Godfrey Lowell Cabot, was a doctor's son who perfected a way to use natural gas to produce carbon black, a sooty substance widely used in making ink, paint, tires and other products.
The company he founded in West Virginia in 1882 prospered, but his son, who took over active management in the 1920s, built it into it a multinational giant now valued at $1.5 billion. The 120 descendants of Godfrey Cabot, who died in 1962 at the age of 101, own about a fifth of the company's stock.
by CNB