FRANCIS ADAMS TRUSLOW

1906-1951

Francis Adams Truslow, our member since 1938, died suddenly of a heart attack last July. He was on his way to Rio de Janeiro with his family as U.S. Commissioner on the United States-Brazil Joint Commission for Economic Development.

After graduating from Yale and the Harvard Law School, he helped to draw up the Securities Acts of 1933 and, forsaking a private legal career in New York, accepted a wartime government position in the rubber development program in Brazil. Later he became president of the Rubber Development Corporation. In 1946 he was named president of the Curb Exchange, which position he filled until May 1951, when he was selected to head the Point Four Program of assistance to Brazil.

Frank’s climbing career was modest, but covered a period of almost ten years. It began with his climbs as a young man in Colorado and the Olympics and continued through two seasons in the Alps. Most of his later climbing was in the Tetons, where he made a number of exploratory climbs and, with R. L. M. Underhill, achieved the first ascent of the southeast ridge of the Grand Teton.

After that, his enormous energy and growing ability came to be completely absorbed in a legal and business career, the responsibilities of which left him no time for mountaineering. There is no doubt that, given the time, he would have been as successful in that field as in business.

He was an ideal mountain companion, and those of us who climbed with him in the early thirties can look back on some fine experiences shared on his rope.

In addition to feeling personal loss, one cannot help thinking how badly the world of today needs men like Frank Truslow and how hard it will be, in broader fields than mountaineering, to make up his loss.

William P. House