Page 56 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 93, No. 4 Summer 2013

His role as Stu Bailey on 77 Sunset
Strip prepared Mr. Zimbalist for another
acclaimed series, The F.B.I. , on which he
played inspector Lewis Erskine from
1965 to 1974.The project was backed by
J. Edgar Hoover, and Mr. Zimbalist devel-
oped a lifelong friendship with the FBI
director. When the two first met, shortly
before the series began filming, Mr.
Zimbalist admitted that he didn’t know
what to expect of the controversial
Hoover. He was pleasantly surprised to
find a man he described as a Southern
gentleman with many common interests.
“We talked for hours about different
subjects, including the movies, Shirley
Temple, society, everything,” he said.
Even during his busiest years, Mr.
Zimbalist still made time for his family.
His son, Skip, recalled regular visits from
his father to his boarding school in Mon-
terey, Calif. The visits usually involved
excursions, including a particularly mem-
orable occasion on which the non-sea-
faring Zimbalists rented a motor boat
and ended up capsizing in Monterey
Bay, clinging to wreckage while waiting
to be rescued by the beleaguered marina
manager. Around that same time, Mr.
Zimbalist took his son to see Dr. Zhivago,
starring Omar Sharif. Having spent a year
in Russia as a teenager, Mr. Zimbalist en-
joyed the film immensely. Skip Zimbalist
remembers his father returning home
after hearing the movie’s opus, “Lara’s
Theme,” only once, and reproducing the
tune frommemory – with embellishments.
Mr. Zimbalist maintained a steady
career in Hollywood for more than six dec-
ades. In his later years, he found success
in voice work, particularly in children’s
television series. He remained a recog-
nizable figure, according to his son, who
said he was often stopped by women who
confessed to having maintained lifelong
crushes on the elder Zimbalist. He was a
Renaissance man who composed music,
wrote a memoir, and painted when he had
the chance. Mr. Zimbalist was an active
humanitarian as well, with a particular
fondness for Childhelp, a residential facil-
ity for children from abusive homes.
His wife, Stephanie, died in 2007, and
Mr. Zimbalist lost his daughter, Nancy,
to cancer in 2012.
Mr. Zimbalist maintained dozens of
lifelong friendships and was a treasured
correspondent with many. He remained
active into his nineties, playing tennis and
golf and tending to his garden. In 2009,
FBI Director Robert Mueller ’62 presented
the 90-year-old Mr. Zimbalist with an Hon-
orary Special Agent Award, the highest
honor bestowed on individuals outside
the Bureau.
“Over the years,” he told Alumni Horae
in 2012, “I’ve helped by narrating recruit-
ment videos, making appearances at FBI
functions, and raising money for the
families of agents who were killed in the
line of duty. I was always hugely honored
and grateful for being an actor and get-
ting to have this kind of relationship with
the FBI.”
Mr. Zimbalist leaves his son, Efrem “Skip”
Zimbalist III; his daughter, Stephanie
Zimbalist; four grandchildren; and three
great-grandchildren. Despite the promi-
nence of his father’s fame, Skip Zimbalist
described him very simply as “a good
man, a humble man, a modest man, and
a gentleman.”
1937
Anthony Drexel Duke
This tribute was written by Mr. Duke’s
nephew, A. Biddle Duke ’81.
Boys & Girls
Harbor founder
Anthony Drexel
Duke, who de-
voted his life to
bettering the lives
of underprivil-
eged children,
died peacefully
in Gainesville,
Fla., on April 30, 2014. He was 95.
Uncle Tony called me last March, as he
would every few weeks, for an update on
my life and family. He suggested I come
down to visit in Florida, where he’d recently
moved to be closer to his daughter and
son, and closer to his doctors at Duke –
closer, that is, than Long Island, where
he’d been living up to that point.
“If you can’t make it, don’t worry; I’ll
see you this spring at Angie’s gradua-
tion,” he said, referring to my son, a
high school senior at the time.
When I arrived at his Gainesville house
on a Sunday morning in early April, he
greeted me in a blue-and-red-striped
St. Paul’s School polo shirt with his
familiar salutation: “God bless you,
Biddle. Great to see you.”
His house was decorated floor to ceil-
ing with a century of photographs of his
four families: St. Paul’s schoolmates from
the Form of 1937, the men he served with
in World War II, his own immense family,
and 70 years of Boys & Girls Harbor, his
life’s work.
“I want to make sure,” he said, as we
sat down to catch up, “that we talk about
your dad, and that I hear about your kids.”
My father, Tony’s only sibling, Angier
Duke ’34, had died suddenly in an acci-
dent in 1995. Tony himself had lost his
father at the age of five, so he was acutely
aware of what it meant to lose a father
unexpectedly.
That April Sunday was a classic Tony
Duke day – eating, talking, even a short
swim at the local pool, and making plans
for a few more adventures. I never would
have known that Tony was in acute pain,
in the final stages of cancer. He died three
weeks later, on April 30, surrounded by
children and grandchildren.
In retrospect, the visit was all about
me. That was forever Tony Duke – right
to the bitter end, always about everyone
else.
Anthony Drexel Duke fought all his life
to give those with less of everything a
fighting chance. Prompted by his exper-
iences with the Missionary Society and
service work at St. Paul’s 80 years ago, in
1937, at the age of 18, he founded what
became Boys & Girls Harbor, an educa-
tional and social service agency based in
Harlem that has helped more than 50,000
of New York’s disadvantaged children
gain a better foothold.
Born into three American family dy-
nasties, the Drexels, the Biddles, and the
Dukes, Tony had a remarkable life, with
“a fittingly lofty start,” according to an
obituary in the New York Times.
“On July 28, 1918, Tony’s mother Cordelia
Duke, on an outing with her husband to
Long Beach, N.Y., went into labor at the
apex of a Ferris wheel. Descending, the
couple raced to a nearby hospital, where
Tony…made his entrance.”
At St. Paul’s, he was a good student and
athlete. He played football, rowed with
the first Halcyon crew, and was president
DECEASED
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