When Fort Lewis College received a bequest of $385,000 from the estate of George Oliver Tiffany to endow scholarships, gift officers had questions: Who was George Oliver Tiffany? Why was he leaving money to the college?
His great-niece Beth McCoy, who lives in Durango, has the answers.
“He was born in Durango and raised in the house at the southeast corner of East Third Avenue and 8th Street,” she said. “He was raised with Dick Turner and silent film star Harold Lloyd, and they ran around and created havoc. I wish I knew some of those stories, but I just don’t.”
Tiffany’s father, George Emory Tiffany, owned the Tiffany Drugstore, and his mother, Lillian Adeline Mayer Tiffany, owned a tea room next to what is now the Welcome Center at the corner of Main Avenue and 8th Street. His grandfather, George Edwin “Ed” Tiffany, founded Tiffany Mercantile in the area where the unincorporated town of Tiffany sits in southeast La Plata County. Ed Tiffany also built the house on North Main Avenue where the Cairo Restaurant is located.
“They were very prominent people, very respectable,” said Emma Shock, 90, longtime La Plata County resident, “very honorable people to have in the community.”
George Oliver Tiffany attended Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, another school he supported with donations, before going on to earn two law degrees from Northwestern University in Chicago.
During World War II, Tiffany smuggled government documents pertaining to the Germans and Italians between Switzerland and the U.S., reporting to Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, McCoy said. While he wasn’t in the military, he was given the honorary military rank of lieutenant colonel.
As an attorney, Tiffany worked first in Illinois and then in Stamford, Connecticut.
“I remember people talking about his appearing before the Supreme Court in (Washington) D.C.,” McCoy said. “All his work seemed to be at the state or U.S. supreme courts on the government side.”
At the time of his retirement after practicing law for 45 years, Tiffany was a consultant for the Nestlé Corporation.
While Tiffany never lived in La Plata County again, he visited, especially while his mother was living. He and his wife, Mayme Quinn Tiffany, never had children, in large part because of her severe back problems, McCoy said.
“He was sort of an elusive uncle,” McCoy said. “He wasn’t into kids, was kind of a gruff man and very proper.”
In addition to supporting FLC, Tiffany was an investor in one of Durango’s first restaurants offering fine dining, Chez Louis. Open only during the summer tourist season, the restaurant was run by a traditional French chef who spent the rest of the year at his restaurant in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Going to restaurants with her great-uncle is one of McCoy’s most vivid memories of him.
“When he came to town, we would dress up and be little princesses and go to the Golden Horseshoe and have steak and shrimp cocktail,” McCoy said. “We never did that. Or we would dress up and go to Chez Louis and have crêpes Suzettes, and they would set them on fire right at our table.”
Chez Louis was destroyed in the 1974 fire that burned six buildings in the middle of the 800 block of Main Avenue where the Main Mall now stands.
While Tiffany died in 1983, his estate was left in a trust. When the final beneficiary died in late 2015, the trustee at Wells Fargo Bank distributed the funds to the college as mandated in the trust documents.
Tiffany had occasionally made donations to FLC before his death, McCoy said, but that paper trail, more than 30 years old, was not available to the gift officers researching Tiffany’s possible connections to the college.
abutler@durangoherald.com
This story has been corrected to show that Tiffany did not attend FLC. He gave the money to the college because of his family’s long history in La Plata County and his lifelong friendship with the family of his childhood friend Dick Turner. The Turners, particularly Dick’s son Nick, were involved in promoting FLC and bringing the campus from Hesperus into Durango. Additional information has been added about his service during World War II.
