Page 63 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 93, No. 1 Fall 2012

63
1945
Townsend Jones Knight
a respected
attorney who
also offered his
expertise in
service to others,
died in hospice
care on March 1,
2012, with his
family gathered
around him and
his St. Paul’s School yearbook nearby.
Known to his friends as “Townie,” he
was born in New York City on August 10,
1928, to Jesse and Marguerite Jones Knight
and was immediately put on the list for
Third Form for 1941, and followed his older
brother, Jesse ’33, to St. Paul’s. His father,
a partner in the New York law firm of
Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle, was
a personal friend of Rector Samuel Drury.
Mr. Knight entered the Third Form in 1941
after attending St. Bernard’s School in
New York City. Despite being one of the
youngest in his class and small for his age
initially, he excelled in math, played football
and hockey for Old Hundred, and rowed
with Shattuck. He also participated in the
Rifle Club, Choir, the Scientific Association,
and the Dramatic Club, and maintained a
stamp collection. He earned Second Testi-
monials as a Sixth Former, graduating
cum laude. The Rector recommended him
to Harvard, writing that Mr. Knight was
“a very good boy, and considerate, polite,
and amenable. He will, I am sure, handle
his new freedoms in exemplary fashion.”
Mr. Knight entered Harvard at 17 in
1945 and graduated in 1949. He went on
to Columbia Law School, graduated in
1952, and immediately went into the Air
Force as a 1st Lieutenant. He joined
Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle in
1953. On October 20, 1954, he married
Margaret “Elise” Heck in New York City.
Their three daughters were born in the
ensuing years, and the family spent sum-
mers on Long Island and at the Knight
family’s beloved summer home on Isle
au Haut, Maine.
Mr. Knight spent his entire career with
Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, making partner
in 1965 and specializing in representing
foreign banking clients as well as estate
planning and other probate issues. On
Long Island, Mr. Knight also served three
terms on the board of directors of Cold
Spring Harbor Laboratory between 1970
and 1995 – he was named an honorary
trustee in 1995. Dedicated to the research
mission of the lab, he contributed legal
and financial expertise to the promotion
of the lab’s biomedical technologies. He
was a trustee of Audrey Cohen College
(later Metropolitan College) in New York
City, served as vice president and
secretary of the Banbury Fund, a private
charitable foundation, and was a director
of Friends Ivory & Sime Trust Company.
Family members agree that Mr. Knight’s
happiest moments were spent on Isle au
Haut, where the Knights were knit into
the fabric of the town and its year-round
island community. It is where his grand-
children got to spend quality time with
him, learning about his love of photo-
graphy and his special fondness for The
Wizard of Oz. A fair-minded, friendly,
and positive person, he led by example,
according to his daughter Elise, who
added that his smile could light up a
room. He struggled with Alzheimer’s
disease toward the end, but died from an
aggressive form of cancer. His hospice
nurses got to know about his life through
his SPS yearbook and other treasures he
kept close by.
Mr. Knight is survived by his wife of 56
years and his three daughters, Margaret
Dudley, Elise Wallace, and Jessica Casoni
’81, and their families, including eight
grandchildren, three of whom attended
SPS: Elena Casoni ’07, Stefano Casoni ’09,
and Lucy Wallace ’09.
1952
Donald Vaughan Little
equestrian, ad-
venturer, aviator,
and investor, died
in Florida on Feb-
ruary 29, 2012,
as a result of a
severe jumping
accident three
days earlier in the
center ring of the
Wellington Equestrian Center, where he
had competed for and won many masters
titles over two decades.
At the time of his death, he was master
of the hounds at Myopia Hunt Club in
South Hamilton, Mass., where he had
earlier served as captain of polo for 18
years. He lived for most of his life on the
family’s farm in Ipswich, Mass.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pa., on November 21,
1934, to J. Douglas Little of Wales, U.K., and
Janice Vaughan of Hamilton, Mr. Little
entered SPS in the Second Form in 1947,
having attended Shore Country Day School
in Beverly, Mass. His parents had divorced
when the boy was young, and his mother
had returned to the U.S. to marry pioneer
aviator Crocker Snow in 1938. On his en-
trance form for SPS, Mr. Little expressed
his interest in hockey, baseball, football,
tennis, and choir. In the spring of 1949, the
Snow family traveled to England, where
Mr. Little visited his father for the first
time since before the war. Their reunion
was warm, and his father assured Mr. Little
that SPS was the very best school in
America. A week after his return to SPS
that fall, Mr. Little and another boy ran
away from school, determined to live
independently. They were apprehended
and expelled the next day.
The event – what the School referred
to as “this unfortunate episode” – did not
appear to ruin Mr. Little’s life. He returned
to England to see his father, learned to fly
his stepfather’s single-engine 1947 Navion,
which he could land on the family’s pri-
vate airstrip on the farm, and graduated
from Governor Dummer Academy in South
Byfield, Mass. He entered the University
of Pennsylvania’s pre-veterinary program,