Part 2 (Obituaries) - King's College - University of Cambridge

184
OBITUARIES
His accomplishments were many. He captained Harvard at squash and would
probably have won a Blue for the different species of squash played here, had
he not broken his leg skiing. He was a capable yachtsman and continued for
some time to play real tennis. He was an ornithologist of distinction. His
contribution to literature through The Paris Review was eventually recognised
when he was made not only a member of the American Academy of Arts and
Letters but also a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur.This enabled him to try
out unsuspecting French restaurateurs in NewYork by wearing the ribbon in
his buttonhole. In recent years he quietly maintained his indefatigable efforts
to aid the funding of the College.
Immediately after his death on 27 September 2003 the gala dinner to
celebrate 50 years of The Paris Review went ahead as scheduled, but instead of
300 guests paying $500 each for the benefit of the journal, 800 attended to
pay that practical tribute to him. His obituary appeared in most well-known
newspapers and periodicals in the USA, includingThe NewYorkTimes, Washington
Post, The New Yorker and Sports Illustrated, and in this country in The Times, Daily
Telegraph, Guardian, Financial Times and Economist. The NewYork Times obituary ended
by referring to a NewYorker cartoon in which a patient is looking anxiously at
the surgeon and asking, “How do I know you’re not George Plimpton?” It has
been said of him: “The epitome of the well-connected East Coast Wasp, he
became the unlikely Everyman.” But that does not do justice to his humour,
his friendship or his style. His friends prefer to remember him as Callimachus
remembered his friend:“Oh, Heraclitus, they tell me you are dead, but I know
you are not gone.Thy nightingales live on. I hear them sing …”
[Thanks to Sir Andrew Leggatt (1950) for contributing this obituary.]
BENJAMIN HAROLD POLACK (1942), nephew of H L Cohen (1919) and
R H L C (1925), brother of E F P (1949) and cousin of K P (1954), was an
outstanding teacher who dedicated the whole of his working life to
Wolverhampton Grammar School, where he spent 38 years. He was
universally recognised by both pupils and colleagues as a dynamic and gifted
man who used his intellect to inspire, never to intimidate.