The Globe and Mail - 18.02.2020

B16 O THEGLOBEANDMAIL| TUESDAY,FEBRUARY18,2020

I

n 1983, a wealthy American wandered into the

Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-

Avon in England. He saw a scale model of a new

theatre that the company hoped to build, if only it

had the money. The American said he would under-

write the project, but he wanted to remain anony-

mous.

Three years later, the Queen presided at the open-

ing of the new Swan Theatre. The American, Frederick

R. Koch, who had built the theatre for US$2.8-million,

stood by her side. But she respected his wish for priva-

cy: She thanked “our generous benefactor” – but did

not name him.

Mr. Koch (pronounced coke) kept a low profile for

most of his life. When the news media mentioned him

at all, it was usually in passing in reports about his

three hard-charging billionaire younger brothers:

Charles and David, who ran Koch Industries, the in-

dustrial behemoth founded by their father, and bank-

rolled libertarian causes; and William, David’s twin,

an eclectic entrepreneur, collector and yachtsman

who won the 1992 America’s Cup. (David died in Au-

gust at 79.)

Frederick, who bore the aspect of an Edwardian

gentleman, had little in common with his brothers.

He devoted himself not to oil, the bedrock of Koch In-

dustries, or to politics, but to the arts and historic pres-

ervation.

Mr. Koch died Wednesday at his

home in Manhattan, where he had

lived, as he preferred, in relative ano-

nymity. He was 86. John Olsen, his

friend and long-time assistant, said the

cause was heart failure.

As an adult, Frederick, known as

Freddie, rarely saw his brothers, except

in court. In the 1980s and ’90s, the four

were embroiled in what Fortune maga-

zine called “perhaps the nastiest family

feud in American business history,”

with Charles and David, two of the rich-

est people in the world, allied against

William and Frederick.

While Frederick did not share the family’s corpo-

rate ethos, he did share, to a lesser degree, its immense

wealth. This allowed him to pursue his own interests.

A philanthropist and patron of the arts, he amassed

extensive collections of literary and musical manu-

scripts, rare books, photographs and fine and decora-

tive arts. His prized possessions included Marie Antoi-

nette’s canopied bed.

He also collected manor houses in Europe and the

United States. The crown jewel was a 150-room castle

in Austria once owned by Archduke Franz Ferdinand,

whose assassination in 1914 touched off the First

World War. The archduke used the castle, known as

Bluhnbach, as a hunting lodge; Mr. Koch used it for

decades as his summer retreat. It provided easy access

to the Salzburg Festival, which he attended every year.

Fred’s spurning of the family business helped fuel

the disappointment that Fred Chase Koch, a self-made

man and rugged individualist, felt toward his oldest

son.

“Father wanted to make all his boys into men, and

Freddie couldn’t relate to that regime,” Charles Koch

told the now-defunct Fame magazine in 1989.

William Koch, known as Bill, said in an interview

for this obituary: “When Freddie was born, he was del-

icate, he liked the arts, he was a singer and loved poet-

ry. He didn’t want to play baseball.”

And when their father sent the boys to ranches to

toughen them up, he rebelled. “Instead of baling hay,”

Bill said, “Freddie would hide in the hayloft.”

Bill Koch said that years later, their father discov-

ered that US$700 in traveler’s checks were missing

and believed that Frederick, who was visiting his par-

ents at the time, had stolen them. Frederick later told

Bill that he had not. In any case, their father was fu-

rious and, after a lifetime of frustration with his name-

sake, considered this to have been the last straw.

“He threw Freddie out of the house and cut him out

of his will,” Bill said. Through a trust, however, his fa-

ther, who died in 1967, left Frederick 14 per cent of the

company’s stock.

That inevitably tied his fate to that of the conglom-

erate, which today, according to Forbes, is the second-

largest privately held company in the country, with

annual revenues of US$110-billion. The Kochs are the

third-richest family in the United States, worth

US$125-billion.

By 1980, the brothers, always competitive with one

another, were engaged in open warfare over the fate of

the company. Much of it was driven by Bill, who enlist-

ed the support of Frederick and a half-dozen other

shareholders who wanted to take the company public

so that they could convert their stock to cash. Charles

saw their moves as a takeover attempt, and the board

fired Bill, leading to a lawsuit and 18 years of legal skir-

mishing.

In 1983, Koch Industries – essentially Charles and

David – settled with Bill, Frederick and the other dis-

sident shareholders for US$1.1-billion, with US$470-

million going to Bill and US$330-million to Frederick.

But as Fame magazine put it, “all the money in the

world hasn’t been enough to keep the family from fall-

ing apart.”

Bill and Frederick said they had been cheated in the

settlement and went back to court. In a tangential ac-

tion, they sued the directors of a family foundation,

which included their mother, Mary Koch. In response,

Bill said, their mother, who died in 1990, excluded him

and Frederick from her will.

The fight ended in 1998, when a fed-

eral jury in Topeka, Kan., ruled that Bill

and Frederick were owed nothing more.

Bill and Frederick eventually reconciled

with David, but not with Charles.

Bill and Charles Koch are the only im-

mediate family members Frederick

leaves. His entire estate, Olsen said, in-

cluding his investments, real estate and

art collection, will be used to establish a

foundation to promote the study of lit-

erature, history and the arts.

Frederick Robinson Koch was born in

Wichita, Kan., on Aug. 26, 1933. While his

father was emotionally distant, his mother, Mary

Clementine (Robinson) Koch, was a sophisticated

student of the arts and nurtured a similar passion in

Frederick.

He left the family home in Kansas in his teens for

the Hackley School in Tarrytown, N.Y., where he was

valedictorian in 1951. He studied humanities at Har-

vard, graduating in 1955. (His father and three broth-

ers all studied engineering at the Massachusetts Insti-

tute of Technology.)

After college, Frederick enlisted in the Navy Re-

serve, then enrolled at the Yale School of Drama,

where he studied play-writing and specialized in

Shakespeare. He received his master’s degree in fine

arts in 1961.

During the 1980s, Mr. Koch bought two apartments

and a half-dozen manor houses. He conducted exten-

sive research on these historic residences and allowed

the renovations to be guided by each home’s history,

setting and aesthetics. Among them were Sutton

Place, a 72-room Tudor mansion and estate in Surrey,

England, built in the 1500s; and, on the French Riviera,

the palatial Villa Torre Clementina, whose rounded

medieval stone towers overlook the Mediterranean.

Oneof Mr. Koch’s favorites was Elm Court, a Gothic

Revival mansion near Pittsburgh. The home’s dozens

of gables, stone chimneys and pinnacles suggest a

small English village.

In Manhattan, he owned two homes. One was a

white marble French Regency-style mansion on East

80th Street, where he died. It was commissioned in the

early 1900s by F.W. Woolworth for one of his daugh-

ters. Ornate paneling from the Palace of Versailles

lines the walls.

The other was a one-bedroom apartment on Fifth

Avenue, where he lived most of the time and felt most

at home.

NEWYORKTIMESNEWSSERVICE

ELDESTKOCHBROTHER

SPURNEDFAMILYBUSINESS

Unlikehisindustrialistsiblings,whomherarelysawoutsideacourtroom,

hedevotedhislifetotheartsandhistoricpreservation

FrederickKochisseenwithMargoLangenbergatadinnerinNewYorkin2016.Apatronofthearts,he

amassedlargecollectionsofrarebooks,photosandothermaterials.REBECCASMEYNE/THENEWYORKTIMES

FREDERICKR.KOCH

PHILANTHROPIST,86

KATHARINEQ.SEELYE

Fatherwantedto

makeallhisboys

intomen,and

Freddiecouldn’t

relatetothatregime.

CHARLESKOCH

BUSINESSMAN,ONHIS

BROTHERFREDERICK

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Born Sept. 22, 1920, in Hertford,

England; died Dec. 21, 2019, in Victoria,

of cardio respiratory failure; aged 99.

S

ince her father was a headmas-

ter, Lavinia Malim was inculcat-

ed early with the importance of

education. As the youngest of a

large family and a woman, however,

her father said that university

would not be possible. Instead, she

was sent to learn how to cook and

keep house.

The Second World War changed

everything. Lavinia trained as an X-

ray technician and lived and worked

in London’s Middlesex hospital.

There, she fell in love with medical

student Kemble Greenwood, and

they married in 1943. They had three

children – the last child born in Sin-

gapore in 1949, where the family

lived during Kemble’s service with

the British Army. In 1954, looking for

new medical practice options, Kem-

ble and Lavinia moved to Canada, to

raise their three children in Victoria.

Lavinia had remained deter-

mined to attend university. At age

43, she started a Bachelor’s in chem-

istry, and eventually finished a mas-

ter’s in education at 59, all while

raising an unexpected fourth child,

Celia. (The Dean of Women came to

the hospital to invigilate one of her

exams, and gave her a break to feed

her newborn.) Celia tagged along on

many evening visits to the universi-

ty, and played with the punch card

machine in the computer lab while

she tried to run her data analysis.

There were numerous battles along

the way with her Master’s thesis ad-

visory committee. One of Lavinia’s

rare compromises was to replace

her chapter titles that she had based

on theJust So Storiesby Rudyard Ki-

pling (e.g., “How the camel got its

hump” for distributions of exam

scores).

Lavinia believed that education

and ability led to responsibility to

give back to the community, and

spent almost 30 years helping stu-

dents and the educational system.

During 10 years on the Victoria

School Board she infuriated many

by making decisions that she felt

were in the best interests of the stu-

dents, even when these decisions

did not align with the power dynam-

ics on the board; these struggles

were relived daily over the dinner

table. There would be strongly

worded comments on the stupidity

of open classrooms and teaching

reading by word recognition instead

of phonetics. She would send her

youngest to a school that started

students with a fully phonetic al-

phabet when the local school did

not.

Lavinia spent 25 years at the Open

Learning Institute in British Colum-

bia, where she taught, by corre-

spondence, math, physics and

chemistry to adult students who

wanted to finish high school. She be-

lieved in strong fundamentals, even

telling one student, over the tele-

phone, to go back and learn the

times tables properly or they would

never be able to pass math.

When Celia was young (her sib-

lings had long moved out), the fam-

ily would sit and read companion-

ably over afternoon tea, with fre-

quent interjections from Lavinia as

she perused texts on educational

theory or practice: “Did you

know...” or “Listen to this, ...”. One

of her often-told family stories was

of her shock when a university stu-

dent and potential lodger com-

plained that her house contained

too many books.

In later years, Lavinia was over-

joyed to be able to help fund gradu-

ate education for some of her chil-

dren and nine grandchildren. Her

youngest grandchild is presently at

university, and this she never forgot

even as other memories began to

disappear. Learning was a lifelong

passion.

CeliaGreenwoodisLavinia’sdaughter.

Educator.

Leader.

Matriarch.

Anchor.

LaviniaMaryGreenwood

LIVESLIVED

LAVINIAMARYGREENWOOD