Toni Frissell

Preface

Some people leave an indelible mark on their colleagues and their time without planning or intending to do so. Yet so intent are they on living and working and doing that they find neither the time nor the patience for keeping any records of what they have accomplished or how they have lived. Cornelius Vander Starr was such a man, whose great brilliance and remarkable energy were matched only by a passion for anonymity that amounted almost to shyness.

But where the mark of a man has been left, it can be found. C.V. Starr's mark was found, not only in the enterprises he built around the world, but in a great many people whose lives he touched. It was those people who made possible this book, which seeks to be less a memorial tribute to a man who lived in the past than a kind of extension of the man himself and of the qualities and attributes in him that still live in those who drew inspiration from him.