A postcard from the edge; Dad's message: 'Corporate America is in trouble, and it's time for a change!' Remembering Stanley Foster Reed (1917-2007), founder of Directors & Boards.

• Author: Lajoux, Alexandra Reed
• Position: IN MEMORIAM - Obituary

ON OCTOBER 25, 2007, at 3:25 P.M., my father, Stanley Foster Reed, took his last breath. An attending physician put it well: "To die peacefully at 90 surrounded by loved ones after a full life ... It doesn't get better than that."

The doctor's words consoled me. So too did the condolences expressed by dear friends, including Jim Kristie, worthy longtime editor of DIRECTORS & BOARDS, a publication my father founded in 1976. When Jim asked me to write an account of the journal's founding years, I readily agreed. How could I say no to the man whose editorial genius has preserved what may be my father's most important legacy?

The early years of DIRECTORS & BOARDS seem like days ago, although more than three decades have passed since then. It was a late October day at the Center for Superior Studies of Medieval Civilization in Poitiers, France, anno Domini 1975, when I first received news about my father's plans for a new publication in a postcard signed "Dad."

What a surprise! Not the publication--the card. Such niceties weren't my dad's style. Known as Stanley Foster Reed and usually signing as SFR, my father, typically clad in Brooks Brothers suits, had a million talents, including musical composition and gourmet cooking, but he harbored little interest in the minor sentimentalities. At six feet tall, with charm that could light a room and a chip on his shoulder that could blow the lights out, he was larger than life.

"There are three kinds of people," he often said. "The ones who care about ideas, the ones who care about things, and the ones who care about people." The last two kinds were beneath him. He was interested in ideas. Big ideas. Lots of them. My father, who read and remembered every volume of History of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant, lived and breathed the history of ideas and longed to play a starring role in it.

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Ironically, it was in the world of things--or, more precisely, the engineering of things--that my father had made his first and biggest financial mark and showed the magnitude of his creative intelligence. At the age of 23, as a self-taught engineer, he laid the foundation for Reed Research, where slide rulers, pulleys, levers, and blueprints would dominate his life for two decades as he filed patent after patent and built a team of foreign-born scientists that helped America win the war and preserve peace. In the 1950s, my elementary school forms proudly identified my father's profession...