The Nautical Nyes

The Richard Nyes, father and son, are a team—in the board room or on their boat. As partners in the Wall Street proxy solicitation firm of Georgeson and Company or as helmsmen of their sloop Carina, they have compiled a remarkable record of wins.

Whatever the common denominator of proxy fight and saltwater race—challenge, excitement, unpredictability, or some quality more elusive—each brings forth the competitive spirit of RICHARD S. NYE '25 and RICHARD B. NYE'52.

Both of the consuming interests in his life originated in accident, the elder Nye claims. He brought a boat from his late partner's estate in 1945, thinking his 14-year old son would enjoy it, "although I didn't have the slightest idea how to sail." The proxy solicitation end of the business, its sole operation since Georgeson's death, started from a like happenstance. A client requested the brokerage firm's help, in late 1935, in persuading bond owners to extend a maturity date which threatened his company with bankruptcy. Nye, who had launched his Wall Street career in 1927 as a $15-a-week runner, notes that "customers' men weren't very busy those days, so I took on the job."

Georgeson, the oldest and largest proxy solicitation firm in the country, runs what Nye says "you might call small political campaigns to get stockholders to vote the way management wants them to" for a roster of clients that includes many of America's corporate giants. They represent them in proxy fights and help them plan for and resist the hostile takeovers that became a familiar phenomenon in the booming economy of the late '6o's. The company has been in most of the well-publicized proxy battles of recent years. "'They're nervewracking," Nye observes with a grin, "but we're very seldom beaten."

In Investor Relations, Georgeson also offers a span of services to help corporations maintain effective communications with shareholders and the financial community. They plan annual meetings, set up continuing contact with security analysts, urge a consistent flow of information in bad times as well as good to establish credibility and rapport with investors, and recommend techniques for financial reports which will reach the disparate audiences of the financially sophisticated analyst and the small shareholder— "Aunt Jane" to "the Street." Their brochures are lively, incisive, readable—models of effective communication.

The Nyes' racing venture is a similar success born of an "accident." Once the sailing bug bit, the condition proved chronic, and the original boat led to three successive Carinas, the latest a 48-foot aluminum sloop. A late starter at sailing, Richard S. Nye was an early winner. Father and son have accumulated 150 to 200 trophies, many of the most coveted in the sport. They have won the Bermuda Race twice and taken class honors twice. They were overall winners in two trans-Atlantic races, to Sweden in 1955 and to Spain in 1957, and class winners in '66 and '69. They've won the tricky Fastnet race off England twice, the Britannia Cup, the Admiral's Cup for England's international series, and the Onion Patch Trophy for America's.

The spectacular 1955 season earned the elder Nye the unofficial title of "the world's top sailor." Sailing the untried Carina II, which had been delivered from Germany only days before, he skippered the 5 3-foot yawl with a youthful crew of seven, including young Richard and Leo Bombard '55, to a double victory in the 3400-mile Newport-to-Marstrand, Sweden, race; winning the Thomas Lipton Cup for first arrival and the King's Cup for best corrected time. Then Carina and her triumphant crew went on to England to capture the Britannia Cup at Cowes Week and win the Fastnet. King Gustav presented the trophy personally in ceremonies at Stockholm's Town Hall. Three years later Mr. Nye became the first foreigner to receive the Helmsman's Medal for outstanding sailing accomplishments from the King.

Richard B. Nye, his father boasts, is "an instinctive sailor, while I'm mechanical." The younger Nye continued to collect sailing laurels when his father was sidelined for a time by a series of eye operations that left him with no vision in one eye and only partial sight in the other. Richard '52 who took his MBA from the Tuck School and joined the Georgeson firm in 1953 as soon as the racing season was over, is chairman of both the Bermuda and the Trans- Atlantic Race Committees for this year.

The father's most memorable race is the 1957 Fastnet, the son's the 1966 race to Copenhagen, when Carina II covered 2000 miles in ten days, ending in an almost dead calm. Weather blended with seamanship in almost perfect combination—"lt had to be the fastest the boat could go," the younger Nye recalls.

Sailing has changed, his father comments, since the "old days, when the fleets were small and the boats big." Ever better design makes for faster and faster, though not necessarily more seaworthy, boats, and "it's become less of a sport and more of a business." But both men agree that "part of the fascination is the luck of the elements," and both will be aboard Carina this summer for "The Race of Discovery" to Spain, their seventh trans-Atlantic race. Then back to 100 Wall Street to pit their nerve and their ingenuity against another kind of challenge, another set of unpredictables.