Ambassador of Music Dies

HERNDON, VIRGINIA -- Gordon Benson Ramsey was a musician and composer long before he took up an unusually interesting day job. For nearly 30 years, he was a Foreign Service officer with the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Distributing foreign aid around the world, he managed programs to build health clinics and roads. He supervised the evacuation of many Americans, including his own family during the Communist takeover of Laos in 1975.

Throughout it all he could always retreat to the deep well of music within him. Said his State Department colleague Dennis Chandler:

"After a hard day he would sit down at the piano, and the weight of the world would melt away."

Ramsey was hardly a dabbling amateur. He'd been a professional trumpet player since his teens, he was an excellent pianist, and he had a master's degree in composition from the University of Utah. He used the G.I. Bill in the early Fifties to to move to Paris and study with the composer Arthur Honegger.

The need to support his family led him to the U.S. Embassy in Paris to ask for a job, which later led to his first USAID assignment in Indonesia. As his daughter Brinton said of him:

"He was able to fit in in different places. He could be the distinguished diplomat, the intellectual, the cool musician, or he could just sit around and have a beer. When we would all be getting ready to go out, my dad would sit down at the piano and improvise. It's one of my favorite memories."

Gordon Ramsey retired from the State Department in 1980 and died June 19 at 80.

From an obituary by Matt Schudel in The Washington Post July 16, 2006