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SSgt Robert Bruce McClelland, Jr.
to remember
Whitney, Cornelius Vanderbilt (Sonny), Col.
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Contact Info
Home Town Roslyn, New York
Last Address Saratoga Springs, New York
Date of Passing Dec 13, 1992
Location of Interment Greenridge Cemetery - Saratoga Springs, New York
He was a member of two of the richest families in the US; but he didn't sit on his wealth doing nothing. He was very accomplished in many areas. He served during WWI as an excellent instructor pilot at Carruthers Field, TX. During WWII he served as an intelligence officer in Asia and the Middle East. After hanging up his uniform, he was a very able Assistant Secretary of the Air Force. Later he served in other government positions.
Entrepreneur Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney dead at 93
Dec. 13, 1992
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. -- Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, the wealthy entrepreneur who founded Pan Am Airways and co-produced the movie 'Gone With the Wind,' died Sunday morning at his Saratoga Springs estate. He was 93.
Whitney died in his sleep at about 8:30, said Edward Lewi, an Albany, N.Y., public relations executive and friend of Whitney. The cause of death was not immediately known, Lewi said.
Whitney was an avid sportsman, thoroughbred racehorse trainer and artist who flew military airplanes in Wold War I and served as undersecrtetary of commerce under President Harry Truman.
Along with his cousin, John Hay Whitney, he co-produced the movies 'Gone With the Wind,' 'Rebecca' and 'A Star is Born.'
Whitney and his wife Marie Louise, known as 'Marylou' in the high- society social circle of Saratoga Springs, never said publicly how much they were worth.
'He's always been called a millionaire, of course, but they didn't say much,' Lewi said.
Whitney owned a 540-acre horse farm in Kentucky and 85,000 acres in New York's Adirondack Mountains. He once described his life as being filled with 'high peaks,' an apparent reference to the name of the highest range of mountains in the Adirondacks, and had said he was most comfortable camping or fishing in hunting boots, flannel shirts and old hats.
He inherited from his father, Harry Payne Whitney, a stable of star thoroughbreds in Lexington, Ky., and went on to train more stakes winners than any other U.S. trainer.
A painter and patron of the arts, Whitney fostered the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, founded by his mother, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and established the Whitney Museum of Western Art at the Buffalo Bill Historical Foundation in Cody, Wyo.
He founded the National Museum of Racing, the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, summer home of the New York City Ballet, and was a major benefactor of the National Museum of Dance in Saratoga.
Born wealthy in 1899, Whitney nonetheless struck out on his own and had made his own first million by age 26.
He joined the U.S. Signal Corps, forerrunner of the Air Force, in 1916 and served as fighter pilot in World War I.
He graduated from Yale in 1922 and founded the Aviation Corporation of America, later Pan American Airways, five years later.
Whitney resigned as chairman of Pan Am's board of directors in 1941 to re-enlist in the Air Force. He rose to the rank of colonel and served in India, North Africa, Iwo Jima and in Washington and received the Distinguished Service Medal, the Legion of Merit and two battle stars.
President Harry Truman named Whitney secretary of the newly independent Air Force in 1947, and promoted him two years later to undersecretary of commerce. He also served as a spcial envoy for Truman and later for President Richard Nixon.
Whitney and his wife were the two largest individual contributors to the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, N.Y.
He is survived by his wife; a daughter, Cornelia Vanderbilt Whitney Richardson of Ithaca, N.Y.; and four stepchidren, Marion Louise Llewellyn of Bradford-on-Avon, England, Franks Hobbs Hosford of Saratoga Springs, Henry Deere Hosford of New Orleans; and Heather Ann Schlachter of Saratoga Springs.
Whitney is also survived by eight grandchildren and one great- granchild.
Funeral services will be private at the Chapel at Cady Hill, his estate in Saratoga Springs.
World War II killed more people, involved more nations, and cost more money than any other war in history. Altogether, 70 million people served in the armed forces during the war, and 17 million combatants died. Civilian deaths were ever greater. At least 19 million Soviet civilians, 10 million Chinese, and 6 million European Jews lost their lives during the war.
World War II was truly a global war. Some 70 nations took part in the conflict, and fighting took place on the continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe, as well as on the high seas. Entire societies participated as soldiers or as war workers, while others were persecuted as victims of occupation and mass murder.
World War II cost the United States a million causalities and nearly 400,000 deaths. In both domestic and foreign affairs, its consequences were far-reaching. It ended the Depression, brought millions of married women into the workforce, initiated sweeping changes in the lives of the nation's minority groups, and dramatically expanded government's presence in American life.
The War at Home & Abroad
On September 1, 1939, World War II started when Germany invaded Poland. By November 1942, the Axis powers controlled territory from Norway to North Africa and from France to the Soviet Union. After defeating the Axis in North Africa in May 1941, the United States and its Allies invaded Sicily in July 1943 and forced Italy to surrender in September. On D-Day, June 6, 1944, the Allies landed in Northern France. In December, a German counteroffensive (the Battle of the Bulge) failed. Germany surrendered in May 1945.
The United States entered the war following a surprise attack by Japan on the U.S. Pacific fleet in Hawaii. The United States and its Allies halted Japanese expansion at the Battle of Midway in June 1942 and in other campaigns in the South Pacific. From 1943 to August 1945, the Allies hopped from island to island across the Central Pacific and also battled the Japanese in China, Burma, and India. Japan agreed to surrender on August 14, 1945 after the United States dropped the first atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Consequences:
1. The war ended Depression unemployment and dramatically expanded government's presence in American life. It led the federal government to create a War Production Board to oversee conversion to a wartime economy and the Office of Price Administration to set prices on many items and to supervise a rationing system.
2. During the war, African Americans, women, and Mexican Americans founded new opportunities in industry. But Japanese Americans living on the Pacific coast were relocated from their homes and placed in internment camps.
The Dawn of the Atomic Age
In 1939, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt, warning him that the Nazis might be able to build an atomic bomb. On December 2, 1942, Enrico Fermi, an Italian refugee, produced the first self-sustained, controlled nuclear chain reaction in Chicago.
To ensure that the United States developed a bomb before Nazi Germany did, the federal government started the secret $2 billion Manhattan Project. On July 16, 1945, in the New Mexico desert near Alamogordo, the Manhattan Project's scientists exploded the first atomic bomb.
It was during the Potsdam negotiations that President Harry Truman learned that American scientists had tested the first atomic bomb. On August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress, released an atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan. Between 80,000 and 140,000 people were killed or fatally wounded. Three days later, a second bomb fell on Nagasaki. About 35,000 people were killed. The following day Japan sued for peace.
President Truman's defenders argued that the bombs ended the war quickly, avoiding the necessity of a costly invasion and the probable loss of tens of thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives. His critics argued that the war might have ended even without the atomic bombings. They maintained that the Japanese economy would have been strangled by a continued naval blockade, and that Japan could have been forced to surrender by conventional firebombing or by a demonstration of the atomic bomb's power.
The unleashing of nuclear power during World War II generated hope of a cheap and abundant source of energy, but it also produced anxiety among large numbers of people in the United States and around the world.
