Grinnell, Ernest Doane (3/17/1994)

Ernest Doane Grinnell III was not your ordinary Dartmouth student. Though he helped in the financial end of WDCR enough to end up on the 1969 Directorate with me, I never knew him until maybe Junior year, though I wonder why because it would seem so difficult not to know who he was. Yet one did certainly have to get to know Doane to appreciate him. Having just heard that he died on March 17, I guess I realize that appreciation was never enough. Grinnell had class, sophistication, and style—yet at one Reunion he freely admitted to having bought a sweater at Jacques Pènè, which I finally figured out was his code for J.C. Penney. Grinnell at Penney’s? I always thought it fascinating that he spent his life in communications, working first for Ma Bell and in more recent years as a consultant whose clients needed to know how to live in the electronic and communications age. Doane had just never struck me as a high–tech guy, but here he was in the vanguard, savvy, technical, and thoughtful. Yet behind his country–club attitude, he could grovel at my gutter humor and somehow we found a common ground as he, Jeff Kelley, Bob Shellard and I planned our strategy over drinks at the Ivy Radio Network Convention, from which he emerged the victorious Chairman in an anti–Yale coup, or over his late–night phone calls to a number of us in more recent monthsssss as his illness must have been worsening. EDG III is the only Classmate I have ever thought it appropriate to refer to by his initials. They fit him. Doane is survived by his father, Ernest D. Grinnell Jr., 722 Dominion Drive, St. Louis, MO  63131-4702, to whom the Class sends its sympathies.