Remembering “Mr. Harvard”
AL GORDON, 2006: With Wall Street integrity and Harvard loyalty as constants, a lifetime of taking the long view.
Photo by Daniel Acker/Bloomberg News/Landov
Albert H. Gordon (MBA ’25), the man known as “Mr. Harvard,” whose name graces the road that is the principal entrance to HBS, died in May at 107. He had been the oldest living graduate of Harvard College and of HBS and for many decades was a notable friend and supporter of both the University and the School.
Born in Scituate, Massachusetts, in 1901 and raised in Brookline, Gordon, a 1923 Harvard College graduate, took a job with Goldman Sachs after HBS. In 1931, with two partners, he acquired the struggling firm of Kidder, Peabody & Co. Thus began Gordon’s 65-year career at Kidder, which he helped lead to prominence as one of the top underwriting and M&A firms in the world, while also imparting trusted financial advice to numerous U.S. presidents and elected representatives.
When it came to his wise counsel and support, however, no institution likely benefited more than Harvard University, which awarded Gordon an honorary doctorate in 1977. At HBS, just one of the Harvard schools he helped, Gordon served on the Board of Dean’s Advisors, the Visiting Committee, and reunion gift committees. He contributed to the School in ways that reflected his many interests: funding for a chaired professorship, supporting physical fitness programs, donating money for athletic facilities, and helping to purchase an organ for the Class of 1959 Chapel. The School established the Albert H. Gordon Professorship in his honor and selected him in 1968 to be one of the first recipients of its highest honor at the time, the Distinguished Service Award.
As the consummate Wall Street veteran and one who had helped Kidder rise from the ruinous Crash of 1929, Gordon said many years later that the collapse occurred because “young men thought they could do anything.” Inside his own firm, Gordon maintained “an air of positive gentility, giving employees a free hand to pursue deals,” the New York Times reported.
Beyond his financial acumen, Gordon also became famous for his devotion to exercise. It was the key to his longevity, he said, along with lots of sleep and no alcohol or tobacco. He was known for walking from airports to downtown hotels and climbing the stairs in skyscrapers. He ran his first marathon, in London, at 81. (Gordon, an Anglophile and devotee of Anthony Trollope, chaired the Trollope Society and was a noted philanthropist in England as well as in America.) At age 99, he was working out with a personal trainer three times a week; at 105, he kept a Manhattan office and was an active investor.
Famously generous to institutions and individuals alike, Gordon enjoyed checking pay phones for coins; the day he scored a $2.50 jackpot was a day he never forgot. And in all his years at Kidder, he never took a bonus. “I had enough to satisfy me,” he said.
