Excerpt from Funeral Service for Charles H. Swift: December 27, 1872-September 30, 1948
His outstanding characteristics, as we all know, were modesty, loyalty, kindness, generosity, public spirit, and a desperate determination to be fair. The only differences we ever had arose because of his unflinching insistence on seeing the other side, on finding some good in every badcharacter, on refusing to impute motives, even when they seemed perfectly Obvious to me. Positive, downright people who knew all the answers did not appeal to him, though he could usually find some good in them, too, and would patiently suggest to them that there might be some con siderations that they had overlooked. He would make earnest eflorts, often at length, to point out to upholders of causes with which he agreed that there was something to be said on the other side and that it was their duty to take it into account.
His own sense of duty was very strong; and it was mani fested in everything he did, from the early hour at which he arrived at his oflice and the regularity with which he went there to the part he played in supporting those causes in the community that he decided were good. He never decided that a cause was good without making a careful study of it. Although he was more than usually devoted to his friends and his family, he would not adopt their causes without an independent investigation. He might assist individuals in need regardless of their merit, because, after all, they were human beings in need. But he regarded his fortune as a public trust and felt bound to treat it as a trustee. Institutions that applied to him for support found that they had to make a case for good management as well as good intentions. When they asked him for money, they were often told to dictate their story to his stenog rapher - after he had studied it, he would make up his mind. He did not react well to high - pressure salesman ship. When he had made up his mind that the cause was good, he would often surprise the applicant by giving more money than had been asked.
His devotion to his friends and family was very deep. If you were his friend, there was no detail of your life that was too small for him to be concerned about. If you men tioned something, however trivial, that you wanted to know or wanted to have, he would unobtrusively produce his memorandum pad and write it down, and you would shortly get the information or the commodity you were looking for, together with the request not to bother to acknowledge its receipt.
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