Benjamin E (Tom) King, 1929-1985

Publication Year: 1986.

BENJAMIN E. (TOM) KING

1929-1985

Tom King, a member of the southern California Section, died on September 15, 1985 while doing what he loved best. He was training in the mountains near Los Angeles for an expedition due to leave less than two weeks later to attempt the first ascent of Yulongshan in northern Yunnan Province, China. In his memory, the members of the expedition donated a copy of Tom’s book, In the Shadow of the Giants, to the Chinese Mountaineering Association office in Kunming, and his family is donating his extensive collection of mountaineering literature to the Club.

Tom was a gentle but powerfully built man, with a radiant smile for everyone. I first met him in the early 1970s, when we were opposing counsel in a hotly contested legal case. After the case ended, we discovered our common love of the mountains, and we climbed together from time to time. I sponsored his membership in the Club in 1982.

Bom on July 10, 1929 in Camden, Arkansas, he attended Santa Monica (California) High School and received his undergraduate degree from the University of Oregon in 1951. He was a fullback on his high school and college football teams, and played the game with the quiet, dogged, straight-ahead determination which later characterized his legal career.

Following his graduation from Oregon, he spent the next eighteen months “roughing it” through 23 countries around the world. He travelled to Europe that year with two Oregon classmates, one of them Bill Byrd, then a climbing guide in Grand Teton National Park. Tom got his first exposure to roped climbing on that trip, when he ascended the Matterhorn, a climb which he repeated twenty years later.

Tom graduated from the UCLA School of Law in 1956, spent several years as a California Deputy Attorney General, and joined the Los Angeles law firm now known as Buchalter, Nemer, Fields, Chrystie and Younger. Tom headed the firm’s Litigation Department, and as a skilled trial attorney, he always had time to train and advise (ever so gently) the younger lawyers in the firm.

His first love, however, was the mountains, a number of which were memorialized in his book: Mont Blanc; the Matterhorn; the Eiger, Jungfrau and Monch; Everest; the Annapurna Sanctuary; Fuji; the High Sierra; and his greatest love, the Haute Route, the grandest ski tour in Western Europe. His vacations from his legal practice were often spent climbing or skiing in these mountains. I recall that on one of his trips, for a week of helicopter skiing in the Bugaboos, he skied well over 20,000 vertical feet.

Early in 1985, he caught a ski tip on a pole during a slalom race, and injured his knee. After several months of recuperation, he began training for the Yulongshan Expedition. He was climbing alone that weekend in September, and his body was found several days later at the base of a 400-foot cliff on Strawberry Peak.

At his funeral, a passage from his book was read regarding an experience which he had following his 1971 ascent of the Matterhorn:

“On the tram up from Furri that day I met a couple from Pittsburgh that was going to Schwarzsee to relax and enjoy the view.

‘Do you think you’ll be attempting the Matterhorn?’ they asked, unaware of my previous day’s effort [three hours forty minutes to the top].

I reflected a moment. ‘Yes-exactly twenty years from now.’

Sure enough, after returning to the States, I received a long letter from Charlie Brown, [his climbing companion on that 1971 climb] with an expected postscript:

‘See you at the Hömlihütte, August 5, 1991—you’ll only be in your early 60s ! ’

Tom was a true friend, advisor, and companion in the mountains, and I have no doubt that he will make that ascent on August 5, 1991. He was a man of his word.

Edward E. Vaill