Winthrop H. Smith Jr.

Winthrop Hiram Smith Jr. (born 1949 in New York, New York) is the former executive vice president of Merrill Lynch & Co. and Chairman of Merrill Lynch International, Inc. He spent twenty-eight years at Merrill Lynch beginning in 1974 after receiving an MBA from Wharton Graduate and retiring in January 2002. He is a 1971 graduate of Amherst College. He began as an investment banking associate and for the last ten years of his career was responsible for Merrill Lynch's growth outside of the United States.

Biography

He was born in 1949 in New York, New York to Winthrop H. Smith and Vivian G. Brown.

Win Smith Jr. is now an entrepreneur and private investor, and he is Chairman and CEO of Summit Ventures NE, LLC which owns Sugarbush Resort in Warren, Vermont. He also serves as a Director of Eaton Vance Corporation and The Nature Conservancy Vermont. He is currently the Chair of The National Ski Areas Association and a member of the Board of the Vermont Ski Areas Association. Previously he served on the Boards of AGF Management in Canada, the Richardson Financial Group, and Richardson-GMP in Canada. He also previously was Chair of The Vermont Business Roundtable and the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce. His former philanthropic duties included serving on the Boards of Deerfield Academy, the Cancer Research Institute, The Winthrop H. Smith Memorial Foundation, the New York City Ballet, The Economic Club of New York, Outward Bound USA, The Japan Society, The United Nations Association of the United States and The Americas Society. He was also a former member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Win has written a book about the history of Merrill Lynch titled, "Catching Lightning in a Bottle: How Merrill Lynch Revolutionized the Financial World." It became available on December 5, 2013, the fifth anniversary of the final Merrill Lynch shareholder meeting. Its website is www.smith-merrillhistory.com

He has married twice. His first marriage to Maggie Smith, which ended in divorce, produced four children and six grandchildren. Eldest in the Managing Director of the Pitcher Inn and Winvian in Litchfield, Connecticut.^[1] He is currently married to Lili Ruane, the daughter of investment professional William J. Ruane and the sister of Boston music impresario Billy Ruane, both deceased. She has four daughters of her own.

His stepfather was Charles B. McVay, the Captain of the Indianapolis. A recent book entitled "The Indianapolis: The True Story of the Worst Sea Disaster in the U.S. Naval History and the Fifty-Year Fight to Exonerate an Innocent Man" by Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic recounts the tragic story of The Indianapolis and the disgraceful treatment of Captain McVay by the U.S.Navy in 1945.

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