Amyas was an old English version of Ames discovered by Amyas's grandmother, whose husband, Oliver Ames, was a governor of Massachusetts in the late 1800s. In turn, that Oliver was the son of Oakes Ames and the nephew of another Oliver Ames, the strong-willed, crafty investor brothers who amassed their family's formidable railroad properties. The name Oakes passed on to Amyas's father, who became a distinguished Harvard botanist, directing first its Botanical Garden and later the Botanical Museum and the Arnold Arboretum. Oakes's specialty was orchids, of which he became our country's most renowned expert with his various treatises illustrated by his wife (Amyas's mother), Blanche.

Like his father, Amyas was educated at Harvard. He graduated in 1928 and two years later, married Evelyn Perkins, the daughter of a physics professor at Trinity College in Hartford. Soon after, Amy and Evy moved to New York City, where he rapidly moved up the ranks of the investment banking firm of Kidder Peabody, eventually to be chairman of its Executive Committee as well as twice a governor of the New York Stock Exchange. Before becoming our close neighbors, they first appreciated the beauty of the Cold Spring Harbor community through spending time on the Fort Hill properties of Nan Woods, whose father, William J. Matheson, was our Laboratory's principle patron at the turn of the century. Living there in much more seclusion than Amyas and Evy was Charles Lindbergh, whose enthusiasm for Hitler's pre-War Germany kept him on the sidelines for most of World War II.

The Moores Hill Road property of Amy and Evy was once part of lands along both sides of Stewart Lane belonging to the Laboratory's ill-fated Eugenics Record Station. Milislav Demerec closed down the station as soon as he became our Laboratory's director in 1941. The selling off of its lands-almost 100 acres-began soon thereafter. One of the first buyers was the Cold Spring Harbor School District, which used its purchase as the site for a much-expanded West Side Grammar School. Demerec also bought land, first for use by his sister Vera and later for use by himself, as a site where he could build a house to move into upon his retirement. The monies coming from the sale of the land were later used to help build the greatly needed new research building of the Department of Genetics that was completed in 1953 and now bears Demerec's name. Amy then had just become president of the Long Island Biological Association (LIBA), having become one of its directors two years before. His being also a director of the Carnegie Corporation of New York must have been a plus, since it and the Carnegie Institute of Washington provided the funds needed to build the (now-named) Vannevar Bush Auditorium.

Later, Amy played an important role in the purchase from the irascible Rosalie Jones of 23 acres of her family's land, to the west of Bungtown Road on the way to the sand spit. At that time, this land was not part of the Village of Laurel Hollow and if not purchased by the Laboratory, it could have been the site of dense residential construction. To help finance the purchase, three building plots off Moores Hill were sold-one to Al and Jill Hershey and another to Jim and Jan Eisenman.

Amyas's ever-growing involvement with the New York cultural scene led to his resignation as LIBA president in 1958, and the eight-year-younger Walter Page took up his mantle. By then, Amy was already a director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, later becoming its president (1963-1970) and its chairman (1973-1980). He also helped lead Lincoln Center itself as its chairman between 1970 and 1981. Equally important to Amy's life was his identification with environmental causes, helping form in the early 1960s the then Long Island-centered Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) in response to the reputed DDT-induced decline of Long Island's osprey populations. After DDT became banned and the osprey population came back, Amy built a platform-topped pole on his Martha's Vineyard property for a potential osprey nest. It soon found users, and when Liz and I also had a summer home on the Vineyard's Seven Gates Farm, we needed only a five-minute walk to hear the shrill cries coming from the Ames's osprey tenants.

Pesticides were long an anathema to Amy, who led strenuous opposition to our village mayor Bill Smutt's wish to spray the mild pesticide Malathion over our village's trees during an early 1980s' outbreak of the 17-year locusts. The strong feelings then generated by arguments between residents not wanting to see their cherished old oak trees put at risk by a second year of leaf defoliation and those residents not minding the occasional dead tree as long as birds were around to perch on them were not easily forgotten. Many once close friends no longer wanted to speak to each other. Trying to defuse the tension, the Laboratory held an evening meeting so our neighbors could hear scientists on both sides discuss the issues. After it was over, however, neither side saw any reason to move closer to the other's view. Though I was once solidly on the environmentalist side, I was then badly bothered by the EDF seeing recombinant DNA as much its enemy as pesticides. Though I soon warned Amy that his organization's ranting against DNA risked alienating its backing by serious scientists, he saw its good features more important than its possible bad judgment about DNA. In contrast, I saw its well-intentioned trustees, badly misled by staff, creating more of their kind through the pandering of irresponsible scare stories. If what the EDF said about DNA was nonsense, should I trust its views on pesticides?

But even when I so strongly disagreed with Amy, it was impossible not to continue to like and admire him. There was no one in our community more committed to our purposes of education and research or who more enjoyed walking through our woods and telling us how much he valued our existence. To him Cold Spring Harbor, unlike, say, Greenwich across the Sound, would always be much more than a commuter's site for sleeping, where residents were always more involved with where they worked than where they lived. To Amy, it was the mind as exemplified by the achievements of science and the arts that reflected human beings at their best. In working so long and effectively on behalf of Cold Spring Harbor and the cultural scene of New York City, Amy never doubted that benefits would flow out to all the inhabitants of our globe.

Noblesse oblige was never better represented in our times.