Walter Curley, Venture Capitalist and U.S. Ambassador, Dies at 93

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/09/nyregion/walter-curley-venture-capitalist-and-us-ambassador-dies-at-93.html

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Walter Curley, a venture capitalist who was the American ambassador to Ireland and France and New York City’s official greeter under two mayors, died on June 2 in Manhattan. He was 93.

The cause was a head injury he sustained in a fall, his son, Patrick, said.

Mr. Curley, who was prominent in Republican fund-raising circles, especially for the presidential campaign of George Bush, also wrote four books, served on numerous boards and was a trustee of the New York Public Library.

From 1960 to 1974, Mr. Curley was a partner in J. H. Whitney & Company, the venture capital investment firm that, he once recalled, helped introduce Minute Maid frozen orange juice, with a plug on the radio from John Hay Whitney’s friend Bing Crosby, who had invested in the company.

Walter Joseph Patrick Curley Jr. was born in Pittsburgh on Sept. 17, 1922. His father owned a railroad tank car company. His mother was the former Marguerite Cowan.

He graduated from Yale, where he was a classmate of Prescott Bush Jr., George’s brother, and of John V. Lindsay, who would be elected mayor of New York in 1965.

After serving in the Marines as a lieutenant in the Pacific during World War II, Mr. Curley grudgingly took his father’s advice and enrolled in Harvard Business School, where he got a master’s degree.

“I don’t care whether you become a foreign service officer, a businessman, a tap dancer, a nuclear scientist or a beach bum,” Mr. Curley recalled his father as saying, “but whatever you do, before you do it, at least learn to read a balance sheet, and it might serve you in good stead, somehow, somewhere.”

Mayor Lindsay, a Republican who later became a Democrat, named him chief of protocol and commissioner of public events, a position he held into the administration of Mayor Abraham D. Beame, a Democrat. He was named ambassador to Ireland by President Gerald R. Ford (his senior thesis at Yale was titled “The Influence of the Irish on American Politics”) in 1975 and served until 1977. He then opened his own venture capital firm.

Mr. Curley was a prodigious fund-raiser for Mr. Bush, who appointed him ambassador to France (he spoke fluent Italian, but said his French was only fair), where he served from 1989 to 1993.

In addition to his son, W. J. Patrick Curley III, he is survived by his wife, the former Mary Taylor Walton; a daughter, Margaret Bacon; and seven grandchildren.