Necrology

Herbert Allan Knox, Jr. '31

Jul. 8, 1909-Oct. 14, 2004

Herbert Allan Knox, Jr. ’31, a prominent northern Delaware County, NY, banker and public citizen who played a key role in the economic revitalization of that area, was born on July 8, 1909, in New York City. The younger son of Herbert A., an attorney, and Ethel Harvey Knox, he grew up in the Bronx, where he was graduated from Evander Childs High School. Allan Knox followed his brother, Walter E. Knox ’29, to Hamilton in 1927 and joined his fraternity, Theta Delta Chi. He played interfraternity sports and managed the soccer and tennis teams in his senior year.

Following his graduation in 1931, Allan Knox pursued business administration studies for a year at Columbia University while at the same time working as a runner delivering documents for a law firm at $7.00 a week. From 1932 to 1935, he was employed by the New York State Insurance Department in its efforts to shore up the Bond and Mortgage Guaranty Corp., which had fallen victim to the Great Depression. After heading the department that successfully completed the liquidation of the company’s capital assets, he joined the Metropolitan Title Guaranty Co. and there organized a new department for processing Federal Housing Administration-insured mortgages. For two years beginning in 1937, he was associated with the real estate department of Mutual Life Insurance Co., also in New York City.

On October 10, 1938, Allan Knox was wed to Victorine Warner in Philadelphia, PA. The following year the couple moved to Delaware County, where her family had roots dating back to the 18th century. They settled down in a family home in rural Stamford, east of Oneonta, and Mr. Knox began his banking career as an assistant cashier at the First National Bank in nearby Grand Gorge. In 1946, after two years of service with the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps during World War II, he began a long association with the National Bank of Hobart, in Stamford’s neighboring town. Promoted to cashier, vice president, and director, he became president of the bank in 1971. Upon his retirement from that post in 1974, he arranged the bank’s merger with the National Bank and Trust Co. of Norwich (now NBT Bank). He stayed on for a year as a senior vice president of the parent bank, and remained for 12 years as a director as well as secretary of its board.

Long highly involved in local affairs, Allan Knox, a past president of the Delaware County Bankers Association, was at various times a trustee of the Stamford Village Library, vice president of the board of the Community Hospital, president of the Hobart Rotary Club, and commander of the local American Legion post. During the 1960s he began to recognize that agriculture, the region’s chief source of income, was on the wane, and that business and industrial development was needed to sustain and strengthen the local economy. He not only pondered the problem but, in his activist way, proceeded to do something about it. Among the many businesses for which he arranged initial financing was a pharmaceutical manufacturing firm, D.M. Graham Laboratories, which literally started out in a former chicken coop in Hobart. Today, as a subsidiary of an international corporation, it is a multimillion dollar business with hundreds of employees, providing major economic strength to the area.

In the early 1970s, Allan Knox took the initiative in forming the Hobart Community Foundation, a public not-for-profit corporation that tapped foundation and other financial resources to carry out local civic construction projects. Among them were the Hobart Community Center and the Stamford Fire House as well as a sewage treatment facility. Mr. Knox, as Foundation president and director, personally oversaw the various phases of their construction.

Almost universally known for miles around, Allan Knox could not walk village streets without being warmly greeted by virtually everyone he encountered. A genial and gregarious man, he had garnered such recognition not only because of his wide community involvement but also because he had helped countless farm families with their financing and numerous individuals with their investments and estate plans. They were indebted to him for his sage advice and encouragement. Well into old age he continued to keep a close eye on community affairs and the state of the local economy. He was impassioned to serve the locality he had come to love, and never hesitant to put in a good word, make a phone call, or otherwise do what he could as a civic booster. Even at the end of his long life he was busily engaged in promoting a new local economic project, Tilsit cheese manufacturing.

H. Allan Knox, a loyal alumnus, died at his home in Stamford on October 14, 2004, at the age of 95. Predeceased by his wife in 1988 and his stepdaughter, Victoria F. Shader, in 2003, he is survived by a grandson, Kyle Shader, and two great-grandsons as well as a niece and nephews, including Walter E. Knox, Jr. ’61. His brother Walter predeceased him in 1995.

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