Beneath the Headlines

ONCE HOME to Zeta Psi Fraternity, Chi Delta Phi (a local fraternity), and a student residence, Ladd House (22 College Street) is currently undergoing renovations to contain the Center for Multicultural Life; the Rachel Lord Center for Religious and Spiritual Life; the Sexuality, Women, and Gender Center (SWAG); the Student Accessibility Office; and THRIVE, which supports low-income and first-generation students and their families.

In 1928, when Zeta Psi was seeking funds for a new building to replace the 1903 shingle-style chapter house, Harry Oakes, Class of 1896, wrote a check to cover half the $100,000 construction costs. It was one of many philanthropic acts by Oakes over the course of his life.

Harry Oakes was born in 1874 in Sangerville, Maine, and grew up in Dover-Foxcroft. A classmate remembered him as “a quiet, unassuming boy, of average scholastic ability.” At Commencement, Harry announced that he was going to find a gold mine, and soon he headed for the Klondike. A fifteen-year search took him to Asia, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Mexico, Canada, and back to the United States. In Kirkland, Ontario, he hit one of the richest veins of gold in the hemisphere in 1912, worth an estimated $250 million.

Harry became a British citizen in 1915, but he chafed under Canadian tax laws, and he moved to the Bahamas in the early 1930s. There he acquired 13,000 acres of land, bought a hotel, donated a hospital wing and a school, built an airstrip, and imported sheep and coconut and citrus trees to improve food availability. He hired local laborers and gave them hot meals, bus transportation to job sites, and wages that exceeded the regular rate.

Oakes was plain-spoken and rough-edged, traits that some found to be abrasive and others thought reflected his honesty and fairness. After donating $500,000 to St. George’s Hospital in London, he received a baronet in 1939 from King George VI. As an investor, developer, and member of the House of Assembly, he was the colony’s most prominent citizen. His relationship with the governor, the Duke of Windsor (Edward VIII, who had abdicated the British throne in 1936), was an uneasy one and is hard to decipher.

On July 8, 1943, Sir Harry, one of the world’s richest men, was found bludgeoned to death in his bed in the Bahamas, while his family was at their Maine home. The murderer(s) had attempted to burn the body. The Duke of Windsor engaged police detectives from Miami; by all accounts, they did a poor job. Attention focused on Count Alfred De Marigny, a twice-divorced man of dubious nobility who had married the Oakes’s young daughter, Nancy. He was disliked by Sir Harry and Lady Eunice and by the Duke of Windsor. The trial attracted international attention; mystery writer Erle Stanley Gardner generated above-the-fold stories about the proceedings for a Los Angeles newspaper. After defense attorneys demonstrated that the detectives had planted a De Marigny fingerprint at the scene, the jury voted for acquittal. There were no subsequent official investigations into the murder.

Eighty years later, the question of “Who Killed Sir Harry?” remains unanswered and provides fertile ground for speculation, as numerous books, a movie, podcasts, and countless newspaper and magazine articles attest. Was it a mob hit orchestrated by Meyer Lansky? Robbers seeking gold? The house guest who was the last to see Oakes alive and the first to find him dead? Was the Duke of Windsor involved in a cover-up?

In Canada, England, the Bahamas, and at Bowdoin, Harry Oakes gave generously. He donated land and built parks on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, and he hired laborers during the Great Depression. As an overseer, he loaned the College paintings by Rembrandt, Hals, Cuyp, Gainsborough, and Hogarth. His estate in Bar Harbor was given to the College in 1957, used as a conference center for several years, and sold in 1973. The repurposed house at 22 College Street is part of Sir Harry’s enduring legacy of sharing his wealth for the benefit of others. With its lingering questions and sensational end, it’s easy to focus on the circumstances of Oakes’s death rather than the impact of his life.

John R. Cross ’76 is secretary of development and college relations.

Leave A Place Better

I started out in computer science. The tech bubble burst just as I graduated, so I went back to school to study entertainment. To me, visual stories transcend language and culture; they revolve around our collective human experience.

I am proud to work and raise my family in East Harlem, where I serve as chair of Community Board 11 and as festival director of the International Puerto Rican Heritage Film Festival.

Community boards are the foundation of our democracy. I became involved in mine after I saw a lack of investment in our community during the housing bubble of 2008. Too many elected representatives are completely disconnected from the day-to-day. We need politicians who will serve the people and then go home and be part of the community, and I’m trying to do my part. I credit that philosophy to my ninety-eight-year-old abuelita, who always told me to “leave a place better than you found it.”

That’s part of my hope for the film festival too, which is the longest-running film festival celebrating the island, people, and culture of Puerto Rico. I discovered the festival—now in its thirteenth year—in 2011 while campaigning for a short film I directed called El Caballero. I have supported it with my own films and time ever since.

Representation matters, and we want to create an opportunity for Puerto Rican filmmakers and the larger Latino community to compete at the Academy Award level. It’s just one way we can elevate an underrepresented population of American society and—more importantly—its stories.

Part of the reason I had chosen Bowdoin was for the fraternity experience, and that went away just before I matriculated. I replaced the social networking that I missed because of that with more time getting to know professors and exploring Brunswick; Richard Gnauck at Richard’s was one of the first and best townspeople I met.

For more from this interview, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.