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William Stanley Mallory Lash 1928 - 2007 |
William Stanley Mallory Lash was born on May 29, 1928, to Dorothy and Alfred (Bill) Lash in Montreal, Canada. When he was eight, the family moved to St. Catherine's, Ontario. Mallory Lash attended prep school at Ridley College in St. Catherine's before graduating from George School in Newtown, Pennsylvania, to which he transferred because it was a Quaker school. In 1949 he graduated from Haverford College having majored in history of art, and from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, with a degree in architecture in 1953. Following graduation from Harvard, he returned to Canada as a practicing architect, first in Ottawa and then in Vancouver. In 1959 he joined the firm Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson and Abbott architectural firm in Boston. Mallory worked for the firm for thirty years rising to a principal of the firm until his retirement in 1990. He worked on many projects at universities, hospitals, and libraries around Boston and Providence. In a Boston Globe interview in 1980 Lash was quoted as saying "Architecture is an art, whose medium is people. If you can make it work, you can make anything work." He saw it as "a drama of designing and coordinating all the players." The love of the outdoors was expected of the young Mallory as he was named after famed mountaineer George Mallory, who died during a summit attempt on Mount Everest in 1924. His father, an engineer who explored a number of far northern "bush" sites for Quebec Hydro-electric, introduced both Mallory and his sister Sylvia (Mather) to the outdoors and climbed with them whenever possible. It was said of Mallory that along with the name came the audacity and skill of the British climber. A work colleague, Lorrel Nicholls, said that once in the 1950's, Mallory had a close brush with fame because of his tall, lean frame when he was asked to audition for the role of Tarzan in a big-screen film, however, he politely declined. Mallory joined the Alpine Club of Canada in 1948 and attended the Peyto Lake summer camp that year with his father Bill, sister Sylvia and fellow islander Mark Mitchell, where he graduated to active membership by climbing Avalanche Peak. In 1949 during his summer break from school, Mallory joined his father Bill, Charlie Nash, Geoffrey Capes and Phil Wolstenholmes on a trip to Elkhorn on Vancouver Island whereupon he made the second ascent of the mountain. And then while he was working in Vancouver during 1954 he joined a large party from the Vancouver Island section of the ACC to Mount Colonel Foster where he made the second ascent of the Southeast Summit with Syd Watts, Bill Lash, and Patrick Guilbride. In 1952, Mallory married MaryAnn Smith and had two daughters. As the girls got little older, the family started making trips to the peaks of New Hampshire's White Mountains. MaryAnn and Mallory loved traveling and made camping excursions to Siberia and Mongolia and a two week horse-drawn caravan trek across western Ireland. Mallory Lash
was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2002 and underwent several operations
and clinical trials but on February 23, 2007, at the age of seventy-eight,
he passed away. Along with his architectural legacy, Mallory is remembered
as the Chairperson of the Rockport Historical Commission and the town
library building committee. He was often seen bicycling around Rockport
early in the morning photographing the historical buildings before cars
parked in front of them. Sources: Smith, Michael.
Obituary. http://www.sandybay.org/obit/mallory_lash.shtml
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