Logan Cheek, 87

Logan McKee Cheek III of Pittsford, N.Y., died March 28 at age 87. He was a longtime summer visitor and resident of Oak Bluffs.

Logan and his wife Pam first came to the Vineyard around 1965, soon after they were married. They initially spent summers on Lagoon Pond, and later became founding members of Farm Neck Golf Club where they built a home on the seventh hole.

He rowed crew at Cornell and the sport was an important part of his life. He kept a shell on the Vineyard and spent his mornings rowing the Cayuga Clipper on Sengekontacket Pond with a pair of Cornell oars. One morning, he rowed past a couple of scallopers who flagged him down. They said that in order to row there, he needed a “messing permit.” After some research — and going to the Oak Bluffs town hall to inquire — he learned there was no such thing. Soon after, Pam gave him a framed quote from The Wind in the Willows that read, “there is nothing half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”

The Clipper met its fate one day around 1999 when Logan ran it aground on Gravel Island and the shell split in two. The quote hung in his office until he died.

Logan was born in Glasgow, Ky. on Sept. 21, 1938 into an old Kentucky family that dates to pioneer days. He grew up in Hyde Park, Cincinnati, and later graduated from Cornell University in 1960 and Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961 where he studied economics and labor relations. His early career was spent with Pfizer and McKinsey in New York City, then McKinsey in Düsseldorf. He served in the Army and was intelligence chief for the East European desk, then went to Vietnam where he was awarded a Silver Star.

He met his future wife, Pamela Wilcox, at a Cornell alumni event in Washington in 1964. They married in Ossining, N.Y., lived in Europe for the next few years, and later raised two children in upstate New York. They all enjoyed their summers on Farm Neck, gardening, golfing, beaching and biking.

Throughout the 1970s and 80s, Logan’s career was wide-ranging: he worked in operations at Xerox, was the New York state finance chair for Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign, and later became the national chair of the business executives for Carter committee. In 1977, he became a business author: Zero Base Budgeting Comes of Age took him on a global tour that included meetings with various heads-of-state.

In 1985, he co-founded a telecom company, ACC, and later became a private investor throughout the 1990s and 2000s. He even produced two albums in 1995 as a Cornell fundraiser: a compilation of big band performances in Ithaca from his undergraduate years and a remastering of a 1962 performance of Beethoven’s Ninth. The classical album made him a voting member of the Recording Academy.

He had a deep interest in genealogy and American history, was a member of the Society of the Cincinnati, and an honorary Kentucky Colonel. Family research took him to archives and historic sites in Virginia, Kentucky, England and Peru (where his mother was born in 1900 to British missionaries).

Pam passed away in 2001 at age 60. In Logan’s later years, he became devoted to his two granddaughters, Charlotte and Blair, and enjoyed time with them on Gayloon Beach in Aquinnah. He loved a good long-bill hat from the Sun Dog and a cone of Mad Martha’s peach ice cream when it was flavor-of-the-week.

Logan died on March 28 with his children, Christen and Alexander, by his side. The family wishes to thank his doctors, nurses and caretaker, who helped him live independently until the end.