‘A Very Personal Loss’ for Harvard

The U.S. Coast Guard on Friday suspended its search of the waters near Nantucket Island for a small plane piloted by philanthropist George F. Baker III, whose family established the Harvard Business School.

Baker’s twin-engine Beechcraft Baron had been cleared to land at Nantucket about 4:45 p.m. Thursday when air traffic controllers lost radio and radar contact, Coast Guard spokeswoman Kelly Newlin said. No trace was found of the plane, she said, which was believed to have crashed one mile south of the island.

Baker, 66, was alone in the aircraft. He was returning to Nantucket after taking his son, George Baker IV, to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey.

A retired investment banker, Baker is the great-grandson of banker George Fisher Baker, whose 1924 grant of $5 million was used to open the Harvard Business School’s campus on the Boston side of the Charles River. The gift from Baker, then president of New York’s First National Bank, enabled the business school to operate as an independent graduate program in what was then the fledgling field of professional management education.

The school’s official name is the Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration: George F. Baker Foundation.

The senior Baker also contributed $2 million in 1926 to endow the Baker Library at Dartmouth College. In 1996, George Baker III donated $3 million to expand the Dartmouth library.

In 1918, George Fisher Baker was ranked as the fourth richest American, trailing only Standard Oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, steel magnate Henry Clay Frick and industrialist Andrew Carnegie. Fisher’s fortune was estimated then at $150 million.

George Baker III graduated both from Harvard College and Harvard Business School.

“He has been a supporter of the school, a friend to the school and an advisor to the deans and students of the school,” said business school spokesman Jim Aisner. “Even though this is a big institution, it is a very personal loss, if it is a loss.”

At the 25th reunion of his business school graduating class in 1989, Aisner said, Baker discussed his many charitable endeavors. Among them is the Quebec Labrador Mission, which brings American teenagers to Canada’s Atlantic fishing villages to run sports and education programs for local children. Baker, a founding trustee, had spent a summer in 1964 as a bush pilot for the organization.

In addition to their Nantucket house, Baker and his wife, Sarah, have homes in New York and Houston. Their daughter Joanna is a first-year student at Harvard Business School.

Newlin said the Coast Guard searched through the night Thursday and all day Friday and found no sign of Baker’s plane.