Evans, GA-Edwin K. Large, Jr., 98, died on April 3, 2011, at his home at Brandon Wilde.
The son of Atlanta postmaster Edwin K. Large and Edna Page Large, Edwin was born in Atlanta on January 28, 1913. As the postmaster’s son, he was on hand for many historic events, including Atlanta’s first air-mail “delivery,” a bag dropped by a barnstorming pilot on top of Stone Mountain.
Ed attended Atlanta public schools through junior high, when he won a work-study scholarship to the Taft School, a boys’ boarding school in Watertown, CT.
Graduating from Taft in 1931, he entered New York’s Columbia University, where he again worked his way through school. He also played first base for Columbia’s varsity baseball team, a position previously held by Lou Gehrig. Meeting Mr. Gehrig at a campus sports banquet, Large asked him for advice on playing his old position. “Essentially,” Mr. Large recalled, “Gehrig said we should field better and score more runs than the opposition.”
In 1935 Large entered Columbia Law School. His interest in law was heightened by the opportunity to assist the prosecution at the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptman, accused kidnapper of trans-Atlantic flyer Charles Lindbergh’s infant son. The prosecution was headquartered in the Flemington, NJ, office of Large’s uncle, Judge George K. Large. Young Ed served, “gloriously, as a gopher.” He always thought that the jury’s controversial guilty verdict was fair—up to a point: “I’m sure,” he said, “that Hauptman made the ladder used to reach the nursery window. Did he climb it? We may never know. But he refused to implicate anyone.”
Large’s scholarship job during law school was working on the cafeteria line in Columbia’s women grad students’ dorm. When Mary Mitchell Westall, a Masters candidate from Asheville, NC, walked in one morning, “she smiled at me, and that was it,” Large said. Married in Asheville on September 4, 1937, the Larges enjoyed 72 years together.
During World War II, Large served in the Augusta-based Signal Corps, where he wrote military-supply contracts permitting industrial giants like General Electric to do business with the Army.
In 1940, the Larges moved from New York to Flemington, where Large joined his uncle’s firm. As an attorney, Large earned a reputation for honesty, commitment and skill, serving with distinction on the Judicial Appointments- and Unauthorized Practice Committees of the NJ Bar association. Active in many local civic activities, Large was also Hunterdon County Counsel for more than 50 years.
After Judge Large’s death in 1958, his nephew became Registered Agent for more than 55 of America’s top corporations, including Eastman Kodak, Standard Oil (now Exxon/Mobil), Quaker Oats, and American Tobacco. This meant that anyone wishing to file suit against one of these corporations had to present his papers at Large’s rural New Jersey office. Through the 1960s, Standard Oil and Kodak, among others, held their stockholder meetings at various sites in Flemington, much to the consternation of New York-based reporters and lobbyists.
Mr. Large was a civic leader in New Jersey for more than four decades. When area Boy Scouts recognized him as Distinguished Citizen of the Year in 1978, Large’s contributions to the state were recognized by then-current governor Brendan Byrne, and three of his predecessors. Mr. Large continued to preside over the Large Foundation, major area philanthropy, until 2001.
Edwin maintained a lifelong interest in sports: As a young man he played golf at Atlanta’s East Lake course, sometimes with his brother-in-law, Berrien Moore, Jr. (who had played with Bob Jones on the Ga. Tech golf team), or with 1938 British Amateur champion Charlie Yates (later secretary of Augusta National), and occasionally with Bobby Jones himself. (“I played near Bob Jones,” he liked to say. “Almost no one was good enough to play with him.”) A lifelong golfer, Large shot his last hole-in-one when he was 78, establishing a new—and still unbroken—club record at the Copper Hill Golf Club in NJ.
In his rare free time, Large taught himself to be a master furniture-maker, turning out widely sought-after Colonial Williamsburg reproductions. He continued this hobby at Brandon Wilde.
Mr. Large is survived by two daughters, Marianne L. Newman of Asheville, NC, and Catherine L. Wetstein (Mrs. Arthur) of Flemington, NJ; and a son, John R. Large, and his wife, Aileen, of Princeton, NJ.
A private graveside service will be scheduled in Asheville, NC. In lieu of flowers, friends may send donations to Trinity Hospice of Augusta, c/o The St. Joseph Foundation, Trinity Hospice Memorial, P.O. Box 31358, Augusta, 30903, or to Covenant Presbyterian Church, 3131 Walton Way, Augusta, 30909.