George L. Shinn, who climbed from trainee to president
of Merrill Lynch, the nation’s biggest securities firm, then led the First
Boston Corporation, a major player on Wall Street during the 1980s, died on
Monday in Scarborough, Me. He was 90.George L. Shinn spent 27 years at Merrill Lynch.His son, Andrew, confirmed the death.
Mr. Shinn was also a director of The New York Times
Company from 1978 to 1999 and the board chairman of Amherst
College in Massachusetts when it voted in 1974 to admit women.
Mr. Shinn spent 27 years at Merrill Lynch, rising
through a series of promotions to president and chief operating officer in
January 1974.
But within a year he jumped from Merrill, mainly a
retail brokerage firm, to become chief executive at First Boston, an investment
company more involved in raising capital for industry than trading already
marketed securities. He later acknowledged that the main reason he had left
Merrill was an inability to get along with its chairman at the time, Donald T.
Regan, who he thought guilty of financial improprieties. “I did not like the guy
who was the chairman,” Mr. Shinn said. “He was not straight.” Mr. Regan went on to serve as treasury secretary and
White House chief of staff under President Ronald Reagan. Under Mr. Shinn, who became chairman as well as chief
executive, First Boston built on its roaring success as an adviser on mergers
and acquisitions largely begun in the early ’80s under Bruce Wasserstein and
Joseph R. Perella. But to Wall Street’s surprise, Mr.
Shinn retired at 60 in 1983 to pursue teaching and — after buying an
airplane — a love of flying. (First Boston later merged with Credit Suisse,
which retired the First Boston name.) As an alumnus, Mr. Shinn led Amherst’s board at a time
when all-male colleges across the country were increasingly turning coed. “We
had to have coeducation,” he recalled in an oral history of the university.
Students were jubilant, he said, but “I was ostracized by the alumni.”
George Latimer Shinn was born on March 12, 1923, in
Newark, Ohio, to Leon Shinn and the former Bertha Latimer. He won a scholarship
to Harvard, but his father, an industrial chemist, refused to let him attend.
The elder Mr. Shinn disliked the Harvard men he had met as a soldier in World
War I because he thought they had received preferential treatment to avoid the
front lines. Mr. Shinn enrolled instead at Amherst, where he spent
three semesters as a pre-med student before joining the Marine Corps during
World War II. Though eager for combat, he said, he was assigned to flight school
and became a flight instructor in Pensacola, Fla., rising to captain. A flight
school classmate was Ted Williams, the Boston Red Sox Hall of Famer. After returning to Amherst for his degree — in
English, having abandoned his ambitions in medicine — he joined Merrill Lynch in
1948 as part of an entry-level training program. While at Amherst he met Clara LeBaron Sampson, a
student at nearby Mount Holyoke College. They married in 1949; she died in 2010. Besides his son, Andrew, his survivors include his
daughters, Deborah Shinn, Amy Shinn, Martha Moore and Sarah Shinn Pratt, and
five grandchildren. A sixth grandchild died in 2004. After retiring, Mr. Shinn
taught an investment banking seminar at Columbia University and was a trustee of
the New York Philharmonic and other organizations. Returning to pursue his own studies, he earned a Ph.D.
in English at Drew University in Madison, N.J., in 1992 and taught courses there
in intellectual history. His dissertation was titled “William James and Henri
Bergson: The Emergence of Modern Consciousness.”
