Jay Robert Reist ’36

Jay died Aug. 27, 1995, in Mexico. He was 81. He prepared at Penn Charter School. At Princeton he majored in politics, graduating magna cum laude, and was a member of Tiger Inn. He later studied advanced management at Harvard Graduate School.

During WWII, he served mostly in Peru as an Army lieutenant colonel and received the Legion of Merit and Commendation Medal. He was a Commander of Sweden's Royal Order of Vasa and was awarded Peru's Order of Merit and the Military Order of Ayacucho.

After the war, he managed W. R. Grace and Co.'s South American regional operations with headquarters in Lima. In 1960, to educate his sons, he returned to NYC as an international v.p. of RCA Corp. Some years later he became v.p. of the international division of the Celanese Corp. During the same year, he was a trustee and director of the Council of the Americas, New York, and Pan American Development Foundation. In 1973 Jay and his wife retired to Mexico, where he served as an administrator of a large orphanage, Nuestros Pequenos Hermanos.

Jay was a proficient writer of sonnets. In the late 1980s, Vantage Press published his book, Sonnets of Here and Now.

He is survived by his wife, Lucy, sons Derek and Michael, sister Dolly McCombs, and three grandchildren. The class will miss this loyal Princetonian.

The Class of 1936