Background
Known as J. Cheever Cowdin, he was born in New York Cityon March 17, 1889 to John Elliott Cowdin and Gertrude Cheever.
Industrialist international sportsman
Known as J. Cheever Cowdin, he was born in New York Cityon March 17, 1889 to John Elliott Cowdin and Gertrude Cheever.
Student Saint Paul’s School to 1907.
In 1936, Cowdin"s Standard Capital was part of the lending group who had to exercise their rights to the shares held as loan collateral of the financially strapped Universal Pictures Corporation from Carl Laemmle. Cowdin would serve as Universal"s President and Chairman of its Board of Directors until 1946. A director of Curtiss-Wright, Cowdin was considered a leader in aviation financing, notably associated with fellow financier George Newell Armsby in the investment house of Blair & Company, which merged with BancAmerica to form Bancamerica-Blair in 1931.
Cowdin served as chairman of the Committee on Government Finance of the National Association of Manufacturers.
Cowdin was married three times in the course of his life. Their union produced a son, John Cheever Cowdin, Junior. who in 1946 committed suicide at age 33 while in Nassau, Bahamas.
According to the New York Times, Cowdin later married Katherine Andrea Parker Berens on December 30, 1941, in Yuma, Arizona. As a prominent American, the TIME magazine reported Cowdin"s 1929 marriage to Manhattan socialite divorcee, Mistress
Katherine McCutcheon Abbott, in Bristol, Maine during a cruise on his yacht, Surf.
He died on September 16, 1960. J. Cheever Cowdin served as president of Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens, New New York In 1941, the track renamed its Junior Champion Stakes Thoroughbred horse race to the Cowdin Stakes in his honor.
He was termed by Esquire Magazine not only one of the best-dressed men of his era, but "one of the Big Four of polo from the time of the great Tommy Hitchcock." The International Polo Club Palm Beach lists him on a 1927 team with West. Averell Harriman and Tommy Hitchcock.
He also played in 1925.
Served as major Military Aeronautics Division United States Army, World War. Member of the United States polo and sports teams Episcopalian. Clubs: The Brook (New York).
Married second, Andrea Parker, 1942.