Rash's Surname Index
Notes for Benjamin COATES
Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA) - Saturday, December 11, 2004
Deceased Name: Benjamin Coates
86, of Haverford, a businessman, racehorse owner and philanthropist, died of heart failure Tuesday at home.
Mr. Coates grew up in Haverford and graduated from Princeton University, where he played on the hockey team. During World War II, he was a Navy pilot stationed in Natal, Brazil. His bomber squadron won a Presidential Unit Citation for destroying seven German submarines.
After his discharge he earned a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania. In the 1950s, Mr. Coates owned a box company and a furniture company. He then went into the oil business and in 1955 launched a 50,000-ton tanker in Nagasaki, Japan. He subsequently owned two 300,000-ton tankers before leaving the business in the 1970s to pursue his real estate interests.
He enjoyed riding and owning horses, said his wife, Nancy Sloan Coates. In 1980, one of his seven racehorses, Tropicaro, won the Prix de Marcel Boussac at Longchamps in France.
Nancy Coates said her husband read voraciously and enjoyed studying American and European history. In 1976, he bought a set of autographs of the signers of the Declaration of Independence from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. He bought them, he said at the time, because "anybody with any sense of history understands that this was the most important group of people ever gathered at one time in one place."
Mr. Coates' own family history included an ancestor who was an original 1682 Pennsylvania settler; ancestors who managed property for Benjamin Franklin; and Samuel Coates, an early benefactor of Pennsylvania Hospital, who helped care for the sick during the yellow fever epidemics of 1793 and 1794.
In 1981, Mr. Coates established two scholarships at Princeton University for Japanese students in honor of Fumitaka Konoe, a college classmate of his whose father, Fumimaro Konoe, had tried to prevent war with the United States in 1941 when he was prime minister of Japan.
In addition to his wife of 61 years, Mr. Coates is survived by a son, Benjamin Jr.; a daughter, Theodate; and two grandchildren.
The funeral is at 11 a.m. Monday at the Church of the Redeemer, 250 Pennswood Rd., Bryn Mawr.
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