Laurance Rockefeller
Laurance Spelman Rockefeller ( born May 26, 1910 in New York City; † 11 July 2004 ) was an American billionaire and philanthropist.
Life
Laurance Rockefeller was the fourth of six children of John D. Rockefeller II and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (1874-1948), and the grandson of U.S. billionaire John D. Rockefeller.
Laurance invested his inherited money and created its own industrial empire. So he founded the ITEK Group, was involved in the construction of the Eastern Air Lines McDonnell and financed the construction of his airplane group.
In the 1950s, he retired from the industry largely returned and invested in the tourism industry. So he built inter alia, the RockResorts, exclusive residences in the Caribbean and Hawaii.
With its extensive assets, the entrepreneur, mainly focused on environmental protection, ecology and medical research a. So he bought with his fortune on land that he donated to the enlargement of national parks in the states of Wyoming, California, Vermont, Maine and Hawaii. Since the late 1930s, he worked on Wall Street as an investor.
Rockefeller also show a strong interest in UFOs and any related phenomena. So he funded include research groups on the subject. It is also known that Rockefeller was the tenure of U.S. President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary Clinton on the subject of UFOs in contact and tried the release of supposedly secret documents to obtain.
Laurance Rockefeller died at the age of 94 years in his New York apartment from a pulmonary fibrosis.
Family
Laurance Rockefeller was married to Mary French (1910-1996, granddaughter of the railway tycoon Frederick Billings ). She was 40 years patron of the Young Women's Christian Association, a trustee of Spelman College, a trustee of the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1992 and founded the first national park in Vermont.
Children:
- Laurance Rockefeller ( born 1944 ), Environmental expert, lawyer
- Lucy Rockefeller Waletzky ( b. 1941 ), physician, the board of the Rockefeller State Park Preserve, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and the International Center for the Disabled, co-founder of the Medical Illness Counseling Center
- Marion Rockefeller Weber ( born 1938 ), biologist, painter
- Laura Rockefeller Chasin (* 1936), psychologist
Foundations
Major foundations were $ 36 million for, among others, Memorial Sloan -Kettering and $ 21 million for the Princeton University. By the end of 1988, he donated over $ 385 million.