Stanley King

Stanley King (May 11, 1883 – April 28, 1951) was the eleventh president of Amherst College. He held that position from 1932 to 1946.

Biography Early life Stanley King was born in Troy, Rensselaer County, New York, on May 11, 1883, the son of Judge Henry Amasa King (Amherst College, 1873 and Columbia Law School, 1877) a justice of Superior Court of Massachusetts and Maria Lyon Flynt. He died on April 28, 1951, at his summer home on Chilmark, Martha's Vineyard, Dukes County, Massachusetts. His body was cremated and remains scattered at Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. A memorial to King is located at Wildwood Cemetery in Amherst, Massachusetts. He was the grandson of Dwight King and Martha Vinton and William N. Flynt and Eudocia Carter Converse. He had two siblings. A sister, Carrie, born on March 15, 1885, was a graduate of Miss Porter's School in 1904. She died on December 25, 1921. Ames King, Stanley's brother, was born on June 10, 1892, and lived for only a few days.

Education King graduated from Springfield High School in Springfield, Massachusetts. He entered Amherst College in 1900 graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1903. He was a brother of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity (Sigma chapter) at Amherst. He graduated from Harvard Law School (completing the course in the abnormally short space of two years), and was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar in 1906.

Stanley and Gertrude were the parents of three children: Richard King (1913–1994), Amherst College Class of 1935; Harvard Law School 1935–1936. He married as his first wife, Elinor Stewart Gates, the granddaughter of Frederick Taylor Gates; He married his second wife Alice Gillette Epps Hotchkiss. She had 2 sons from her previous marriage. She survived him. Gertrude King (1916–1969), Vassar College class of 1938, married Roger Wolcott Toll Jr., son of mountaineer and former Yellowstone National Park superintendent Roger Wolcott Toll, June 25, 1952. They had two children. They divorced Feb 22, 1962. and Margaret King (1917–1923).

After his first wife Gertrude's death, Stanley married in 1927 Mrs. Margaret Pinckney Jackson-Allen, who married as her first husband, Arthur Moulton Allen of Providence, Rhode Island. She died in 1967.

Gertrude Louisa Besse's sister, Florence Foster Besse, a 1907 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Wellesley College married Kingman Brewster Sr., a 1906 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Amherst College and a 1911 graduate of the Harvard Law School. He was a direct lineal descendant of Elder William Brewster (pilgrim), (c. 1567 – April 10, 1644), the Pilgrim colonist leader and spiritual elder of the Plymouth Colony and a passenger on the Mayflower. They were the parents of Kingman Brewster, Jr., (June 17, 1919 – November 8, 1988) an educator, president of Yale University, and American diplomat.

Career After graduating from Harvard Law School, he was employed as secretary and a director of the W. H. McElwain Co., a shoe manufacturer in Boston, Massachusetts; he was made vice-president of the company in 1919. . In the 1930s, President King led the College through the crisis of the Great Depression by achieving financial solutions that enabled Amherst to avoid annual deficits or reductions in salary. The disruptions of World War II, 1941–1945, were handled with similar effectiveness with a long-range focus on developing a "New Curriculum" for the College to meet modern post-war needs.

After retiring as President in 1946, he was President Emeritus until his death in 1951. The Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College holds his papers.

Selected works

Recollections of the Folger Shakespeare Library (1950); A History of the Endowment of Amherst College (1950); The Consecrated Eminence: The Story of the Campus and Buildings of Amherst College (1952).