Stalwart of Two Coasts: Richard Stockton Rush Jr. — A Portrait of Family, Service, and Enterprise

A concise portrait

Roots and early life

Richard Stockton Rush Jr. arrived into the world on 15 November 1930, a child of a lineage that read like a map of American institutional life — a family threaded to names that recur in the nation’s history. He was born into the eastern branch of a family with Princeton ties and a woven pedigree that tied together Rush and Stockton forebears. These ancestral threads shaped a life that would cross coasts and industries, moving from Philadelphia society to San Francisco civic life with the ease of someone accustomed to carrying legacy and reinvention at once.

His formative years culminated in enrollment at Princeton University, where he matriculated with the Class of 1953. Princeton would be the stage for early accomplishments — on-campus theatrics, club affiliations, and friendships that carried forward for decades.

Education, service, and formative discipline

Princeton (Class of 1953) furnished Rush with a liberal-arts grounding and a social network that bridged old East Coast families and the growing postwar American business class. Immediately following graduation he served his country in the U.S. Marine Corps between approximately 1953 and 1955. Accounts of his time in uniform emphasize reconnaissance volunteer work — a terse, disciplined chapter that likely informed both his later leadership style and appetite for organized enterprise.

There is a compact logic to that trajectory: classroom, then amphibious discipline, then an immersion in the private sector. Each step added a new tool — ideas, rigor, and practical command.

Business: oil, development, and the entrepreneur’s temperament

Across the decades after military service, Rush’s career centered on oil and gas and related business ventures. He was reported to have chaired companies and to have been involved in leadership at enterprises such as Peregrine Oil & Gas and other corporate entities. Business activity extended beyond hydrocarbon fields; he engaged in property and development projects, including work tied to a preserve named Takaro in New Zealand, suggesting a reach that was international and diversified.

Numbers and dates mark the arc: the 1950s and 1960s as entry and establishment years; the 1970s through the 1990s as decades of active corporate leadership. He carried titles that implied fiduciary responsibility and boardroom influence. The image is not of a celebrity industrialist, but of a company man who moved behind the scenes — chairing boards, guiding strategy, and stewarding assets.

The entrepreneurial temperament he displayed was pragmatic: operate where capital and opportunity meet, and leverage family networks when prudent. That temperament also led him to co-found or participate in social and educational ventures — for example, involvement in the Recovery Institute focused on alcohol-abuse education, blending civic concern with organizational know-how.

Civic life, theatre, and the Bohemian Club

Rush’s life was not only ledger and deed. He carried a strong civic presence: on campus he had been involved with the Triangle Club, the theatrical tradition that showcases performance, satire, and camaraderie. Later, in the San Francisco Bay Area, he participated in cultural and private civic groups and was reported as president-elect of the Bohemian Club — a sign of local standing and social capital. Theatre, philanthropy, club leadership: these forms of engagement show a personality at ease in public life and private influence alike.

This duality — boardroom seriousness and stage-light playfulness — produced a man who could read balance sheets one moment and recite lines or organize fundraisers the next. It is a blend rarely captured in sound bites but visible in the pattern of affiliations.

Family: marriages, children, and multigenerational ties

Rush’s private life intersected with prominent families. In the late 1950s he married Ellen Margaret Davies, a member of a well-known San Francisco family with its own civic and philanthropic history. Ellen (born 1931) died in 1988. Later, Rush was married to Nancy, who is recorded as surviving him at his death in 2000.

He fathered three children: Richard Stockton Rush III (b. 1962), commonly called Stockton Rush; Deborah Rush; and Catherine Rush. Stockton Rush III would grow into a public profile of his own decades later, engaged in engineering and deep-sea expedition ventures. The family is thus a study in layered reputations: one generation concentrated in business and local civic life; the next branching into high-publicity entrepreneurship.

The Davies connection, meanwhile, stitched the Rush family into San Francisco’s philanthropic fabric. Names and events in the family archive suggest a household accustomed to stewardship — of money, of institutions, and of family memory — as much as to private life.

A timeline in tabular form

Character and legacy, sketched rather than sealed

Richard Stockton Rush Jr.’s life reads like a map of mid-20th century American upper-middle class mobility: preparation at a venerable university, service in uniform, a postwar career in energy and development, and civic commitments that knit the social and the practical together. He was a bridge-figure — between East Coast lineage and West Coast civic life, between private family legacy and public institutional stewardship. He moved through rooms where decisions were made, boards were convened, and fund-raisers were plotted; and he did so with the steady, low-glare presence of someone for whom legacy was both inheritance and obligation.

His biography is a study in continuity: dates, roles, and family connections that together form a lattice. The facts are clean lines on the page, but the life between those lines contained the textures you cannot numerically measure: loyalty to institutions, the care of family, and the small, daily habits that compound into reputation. Like a ship steady at anchor, his life held course while the tides of industry and culture shifted around him.