Necrology

Griffin Miller Bates, Jr. '57

Dec. 14, 1935-Apr. 21, 2023

Griffin Miller Bates, Jr. ’57 died in Audubon, Pa., on April 21, 2023. Born on Dec. 14, 1935, and raised in Jamaica, Queens, N.Y., he came to Hamilton from Jamaica High School. On the Hill, he was a member of Alpha Delta Phi fraternity and majored in biology to prepare for a medical career. 

Not surprisingly given his interest, Griff was a member of the Biology Club throughout his time at Hamilton. He also performed with the Charlatans, was a cheerleader during his sophomore and junior years, and was both a contributor to and staff member of The Continental during his final two years on campus. He played intramural football, basketball, and softball. He was his class’s McKinney Prize Speaker as a junior, and in his senior year was a member of Nous Onze. 

Griff entered the Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons in the fall of 1957. Just before the start of that semester, on Aug. 31, he was an usher at the wedding of Bob Regan ’57, and there he met Patricia Louise O’Brien, a graduate of Notre Dame College (Staten Island). They were married not quite one year after they met, on Aug. 23, 1958, in Brooklyn just before the start of his second year at Columbia. They had two sons and a daughter.

During medical school, Griff played on Columbia’s basketball team, co-authored and directed the freshman play, joined the Westchester Rugby Club, and boxed in the New York Golden Gloves tournament.

After earning his medical degree in June 1961, he immediately took up a year’s internship at Mary Imogene Bassett Hospital in Cooperstown, N.Y. In 1962, he began a three-year residency in psychiatry at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, N.Y., after which he joined the U.S. Army for two years. He was assigned to Valley Forge Army Hospital in Phoenixville, Pa. 

Discharged with the rank of captain, Griff worked as a clinical psychiatrist in the Philadelphia area while his family lived in Bryn Mawr, Pa. In 1970, he established a private practice while continuing to work at Gaudenzia House, a therapeutic community treating those with drug addiction. 

In 1971, Griff and his family moved to Rutland, Vt., where he established a part-time psychiatric practice and also worked as an emergency room doctor at both the Rutland Regional Medical Center and the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Hospital in Hanover, N.H.

But, increasingly, Griff’s avocation began to intrude on his vocation, and he became a practicing artist. His interest in painting had begun on the Hill when he took art classes. It came into focus in the summer following his graduation from Hamilton after he attended an outdoor art show in New York City. While he may have begun as a “Sunday painter,” over time he became increasingly immersed in it. On one alumni questionnaire from the early 1970s, he went so far as to identify his profession as ”artist,” rather than “psychiatrist,” and would later describe the 40-year period between 1957 and his retirement from his psychiatric practice in 1996 as one of “balancing the art and the medicine.” From time to time, he would mount exhibits of his work, among the earliest being a one-man show in March 1970.

In 1985, Griff and his family moved to Ellicott City, Md., and he joined the Spring Grove Hospital Center in nearby Catonsville. From 1988 until his retirement, he worked part time as a clinical psychiatrist in a research unit for patients suffering from treatment-resistant schizophrenia, work he would describe in his 40th reunion yearbook as “the most rewarding experience I’ve had in medicine.” 

After 1996, he devoted all of his creative energy to his art, and others continued to take notice. Beginning in January 1998, he exhibited his work for six weeks at the Maryland Hall of Creative Arts in Annapolis. In 2004, 12 of Griff’s collages were on display at the Columbia (Md.) Art Center, and other exhibits followed. 

Despite receiving a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease in 2010, he continued to work. He reported in 2017 that his artistic creativity enabled him to “maintain his life” and urged others similarly afflicted to consider art’s therapeutic benefits. His preferred medium was collage, and, despite his illness, he set a goal of creating 100 collages intended to “connect the human soul to the soul of the world.”

Hamilton meant a great deal to Griff. In his 50th reunion yearbook he wrote: “Studying Kafka, poetry in English classes, and art class all worked together to help me begin writing poetry and painting, both of which I continue to this day. Frau and Walter Schmidt (cooks at the fraternity house [Alpha Delta Phi]) were excellent role models in responsibility, good citizenship, hard work, and caring.” In return, he was a member of his class committee and a volunteer with the Career Center.

Griffin M. Bates, Jr. was predeceased by his uncle, L. Danforth Bates, Class of 1924. He is survived by his wife, three children, seven grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.

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