Life
Born in Chicago, Illinois, William Stevenson won the AAU championships in 440 yd (400 m) in 1921.
He was a graduate of Andover and Princeton before winning a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, where he studied law. After returning to United States, he was an assistant U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York in the 1920s and, in 1931, founded the prominent New York law partnership of Debevoise, Stevenson, Plimpton and Page, now Debevoise & Plimpton L.L.P.
In 1937, Stevenson bought Buttonwood Manor in the North Stamford section of Stamford, Connecticut, an 1809 Colonial-style house. When Stevenson and his wife went to England during World War II, they rented the house to Dorothy Fields, a renowned lyricist, according to the columnist and war correspondent Ernie Pyle.
During the World War II, Stevenson and his wife, Eleanor "Bumpie" Bumstead Stevenson, a 1923 graduate of Smith College, organized and administered American Red Cross operations in Great Britain, North Africa, Sicily, and Italy. Both he and his wife were awarded the Bronze Star for meritorious achievement in support of military operations.
In 1946, Stevenson succeeded Ernest Hatch Wilkins as a president of Oberlin College. He held this post until John F. Kennedy appointed him as an ambassador to Philippines in 1962, where he served until 1965. He then became the head of the Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies in Colorado.
Eleanor Stevenson was the author of I Knew Your Soldier in 1946. She was active in the civil rights movement and the first person to give a nationally broadcast speech on behalf of Planned Parenthood.
He was the father of U.S. Representative Helen Stevenson Meyner, who served for two terms, from 1975 to 1979. She was the wife of two-term New Jersey Gov. Robert B. Meyner. His other daughter, Priscilla, married Richard Hunt, a Harvard professor and the university's marshal.
He was also a cousin of the Vice-President Adlai E. Stevenson, presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, Senator Adlai Stevenson III, and actor McLean Stevenson, and the father-in-law of New Jersey Governor Robert B. Meyner.
Stevenson died in Fort Myers, Florida, aged 84.
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Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night ... shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“He is a strong man who can hold down his opinion. A man cannot utter two or three sentences, without disclosing to intelligent ears precisely where he stands in life and thought, namely, whether in the kingdom of the senses and the understanding, or, in that of ideas and imagination, in the realm of intuitions and duty.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The poet’s body even is not fed like other men’s, but he sometimes tastes the genuine nectar and ambrosia of the gods, and lives a divine life. By the healthful and invigorating thrills of inspiration his life is preserved to a serene old age.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)