Page 58 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 94, No. 2 Winter 2014

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Mr. Nevin was born on May 17, 1933, in
Boston and spent his early years in Darien,
Conn., and Great Neck, N.Y., with his par-
ents, Paul Nevin and Jennie Fassett Nevin,
and his three siblings. During World War
II, Mr. Nevin’s father taught celestial
navigation at the U.S. Merchant Marine
Academy. His grandfather and namesake,
Ethelbert Nevin, was a 19th-century
composer best known for “Mighty Lak’ a
Rose” and “Narcissus.”
Mr. Nevin arrived at SPS as a Second
Former in the fall of 1947. He was a
member of the Glee Club and the soccer
team. He went on to Kenyon College in
Gambier, Ohio, and Columbia School of
General Studies in New York, eventually
graduating in 1958 from Union College in
Schenectady, N.Y., with a B.A. in English.
Mr. Nevin spent two years in the U.S.
Army’s 4th Armored Division in West
Germany. While there, he bought a gray
1963 Karmann Ghia roadster, which he
shipped back to the U.S. and kept in Maine.
Until a few weeks before his death, Mr.
Nevin could be seen driving the car, top
down, on roads around Blue Hill.
On returning to the U.S. after his Army
service, Mr. Nevin was hired as a college
textbook salesman by the American Book
Co. He and his colleagues were known as
college travelers in their New England
territory, a reference to their time spent
driving from campus to campus, plying
their wares. Mr. Nevin liked to say he was
ideally suited for the job. Never having
read any of his textbooks while he was a
student himself, he said he therefore had
no preconceived notions of what made
for a good textbook.
His textbook orthodoxy notwithstanding,
Mr. Nevin enjoyed slyly dropping puns
and palindromes into the conversation.
He once described a palindrome as “a
small friend who meets you at the airport.”
Mr. Nevin was once the subject of a story
in The New Yorker , occasioned by the
theft of an old harpsichord from his home
in Maine. Somehow, the harpsichord
made its way to San Francisco while Mr.
Nevin was still living there and a Maine
detective called him up and asked him to
go have a look at the instrument, which
had been seized by police and taken into
protective custody.
1955
Bayard Foster Pope III
who spent his
career in financial
services and took
joy in entertaining
his SPS form-
mates at his home
for reunions, died
on October 8,
2013. He was 76.
Mr. Pope was
born in New York City on February 25,
1937, to Bayard Foster Pope Jr. of the Form
of 1930 and Marjorie Reid Pope. Known
as “Mickey” to his friends at St. Paul’s, he
entered the School in the fall of 1950. He
lettered in football, hockey, and baseball,
captaining the team as a Sixth Former. He
was one of the finest Isthmian athletes of
his Sixth Form year.
Mr. Pope was a camp counselor and
belonged to the Glee Club, Le Cercle
Franç ais, the Athletic Association, and
the Missionary Society. He was a super-
visor in Manville.
After leaving St. Paul’s, he earned his
B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania,
where he was a member of the Saint Elmo
Club Fraternity. In 1959, he moved to
New York City, where he started his long
career in the financial services industry,
which included a senior vice presidency
at Citizens Bank. He eventually ended up
at White Weld and Co., where, at 33, he was
made the youngest vice president in the
firm’s long history. He managed the firm’s
Municipal Bond Trading Department.
In 1970, Mr. Pope moved to Hopkinton,
N.H., and took a position with Concord
National Bank, where he managed the
bank’s portfolio for many years. He retired
in 1993 but continued to work as a finan-
cial advisor well into his seventies.
Mr. Pope was one of the founders and
served as an original director of the New
Hampshire Municipal Bond Bank. He was
a member of the Education Committee of
the N.H. Bankers Association and former
chairman of the Northern New England
School of Banking. He was also a member
of the New Hampshire Supreme Court
Conduct Committee for 11 years, serving
as vice chairman from 2000 to 2002.
After three years with American Book,
Mr. Nevin moved to the publishing firm
W.W. Norton & Co., moving to San Fran-
cisco in 1964 and taking over a wide-
ranging sales territory that took him all
over California, Alaska, the Pacific North-
west, and Hawaii. It was in 1975, while
he was in San Francisco, that he bought
Curlew. He kept the boat in Sausalito and
sailed mostly around San Francisco Bay
and occasionally up the coast to Bodega
Bay and down to Monterey Bay.
But Mr. Nevin missed cruising the craggy
coast of Maine. In 1979, he was chatting
with a professor friend in Bakersfield,
Calif. The friend told him of a recent
voyage he had made far out in the Pacific
to the South Sea islands on his Westsail
32. This stirred Mr. Nevin’s blood, and
he took an unpaid leave from his book-
selling job, packed up the boat, and left
San Francisco Bay in October 1979. He
was supported by a rotation of crew mem-
bers through the ensuing nine-month
voyage, which ended when he sailed into
Blue Hill Bay in July 1980. The 7,000-mile
journey was his longest on the sea and
included travel down the California coast,
through the Panama Canal, over the Carib-
bean Sea, and up the East Coast to Maine.
Curlew stayed in Maine and Mr. Nevin
cruised her throughout New England and
up past Nova Scotia to the end of Cape
Breton Island. A few years ago, he sold
the wooden boat because he said it was
getting too expensive to maintain. In
1995, Mr. Nevin left San Francisco and
moved permanently to Blue Hill. He
retired from W.W. Norton in 1996 and,
at the end of that year, married fine art
curator Jennifer Mitchell.
Mr. Nevin was a member of the Cruis-
ing Club of America and a past commo-
dore of the Kollegewidgwok Yacht Club
in Blue Hill. Until shortly before his
death, he was still editing the yacht club’s
newsletter, The Waterline.
Mr. Nevin’s survivors include his wife,
Jennifer Mitchell-Nevin; his sister, Jane
Guinness; his brother, Crocker Nevin ’42;
and numerous nieces, nephews, great-
nieces, and great-nephews. He was pre-
deceased by his sister, Anne Chamberlin.
DECEASED