Harvey M. Spear, 94
Harvey M. Spear, an attorney who served with the United States Marine Corps during World War II, died on Jan. 22 at his home in Manhattan. A longtime resident of East Hampton, as well, he had been ill for some time. He was 94 years old.
Mr. Spear practiced law at private firms in New York and in a variety of roles for the U.S. government. After graduating in 1948 from Harvard Law School, he served as an assistant U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C.; as legal assistant to the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, as an attorney in the Office of the General Counsel, and as an examiner in the Division of Corporate Finance.
In 1950 he was a special assistant in the Justice Department to Attorney General J. Howard McGrath. In 1956, he was legislative assistant to Senator John O. Pastore, and in 1962, he was special counsel to Senator Claiborne Pell. Both senators were from Rhode Island, where Mr. Spear was born.
In 1954, he formed his own firm, Spear and Hill, in New York City. Later, he was a partner at Jacobs, Persinger, and Parker, and counsel to Cadwalader, Wickersham, and Taft and to McElroy, Deutsch, Mulvaney, and Carpenter.
Mr. Spear had extensive investigative experience with matters involving the Securities Exchange Act and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. He called his work as chief counsel to a commission investigating the 1991 collapse of the Rhode Island Share and Depositor’s Indemnity Corporation “the most rewarding experience” of his professional career, according to his family.
He loved East Hampton, where he and his wife, the cookbook author Ruth Spear, had a house on Hither Lane. He also loved and owned horses, and enjoyed jumping and fox hunts. As president of the Washington International Horse Show, he was instrumental in rescuing the organization from bankruptcy.
Mr. Spear was a classical music fan from childhood, when he played the violin. A former chairman of the National Council of the Metropolitan Opera’s executive committee, he also organized the American Friends of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and served as its president and treasurer.
He was a longtime student of international affairs, including the Spanish Civil War, and a Shakespeare scholar.
From 1963 to 1969, Mr. Spear was treasurer for the New York City Democratic Committee. He was on the administrative council of the Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, and on the president’s council of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
He was born on May 24, 1922, in Providence, a son of Alfred Spear and the former Esther Marcus. As a sophomore at Brown University in 1940, before America entered World War II, he enlisted in the Marines, and was commissioned a first lieutenant after graduating. He was assigned at first to radar duty on Midway Atoll in the Pacific. After a year, told he would be reassigned there, he responded that he had not enlisted to sit out the war on Midway; he was then sent, via Guadalcanal, to the island of Peleliu, now called Palau, where Marines fought from September to November 1944 before prevailing. Upon landing on the island, while a battle with Japanese forces was raging nearby, he participated in Yom Kippur services alongside a recently secured airstrip runway.
His journey to Guadalcanal, with Mr. Spear dozing en route, was depicted in a photograph that appeared in The Saturday Evening Post.
He returned home to Providence in 1944 and was discharged from the Marines the following year. An active Brown alumnus, Mr. Spear was appointed chief marshal of the university’s 224th commencement in 1992, the year of his 50th reunion.
Mr. Spear married the former Ruth Abramson on June 27, 1965. The couple had two daughters. Elizabeth Spear predeceased her father; Jessica Spear of New York City survives. Also surviving is a brother, Gerald Spear of Newport Beach, Calif., and a granddaughter. Two brothers and a sister died before him.
Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman officiated last Thursday at a funeral service at the Jewish Center of the Hamptons, of which Mr. Spear was an early member. Burial followed at the temple’s Shaarey Pardes Cemetery in Springs.
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Correction: The photograph that originally appeared with this obituary was printed in error and was not a photograph of Harvey Spear.