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August 27, 2019 Cheever S. Tyler, 1937-2019

’New Haven’s Renaissance Man’

PHOTO | Frank Rizzo Cheever Tyler

If business cards were subject to truth-in-advertising requirements, the job title on Cheever Tyler’s business card would have read “Pillar of the Community.”

A pillar that has fallen. Tyler passed away last Friday (Aug. 23) at Yale-New Haven Hospital. He was 81.

Cheever Tyler was many things — lawyer, civic leader, philanthropist, artist. More than anything, he was “a force of nature,” recalls Frances T. (Bitsie) Clark, former executive director of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven, who worked with Tyler when he headed the Arts Council board as well as on many other community endeavors, cultural and otherwise.

Tyler lived a life that on its surface might be characterized as “privileged” but was buffeted by turbulence and challenges. At age six his upper-class parents (his father was a diplomat for the State Department) sent him away to boarding school. About two months after Cheever arrived at Fessenden, the headmaster called him into his office to tell the young Cheever that his parents were divorcing. (Later in life Tyler would likewise divorce his first wife, Vassar grad Patricja Pierce, and remarry Sally Schlapp Tyler, now his widow.)

At 17 Tyler came to New Haven to attend Yale, where he was tapped for Skull & Bones. He was also business manager of the Yale Daily News — one of his first major triumphs in the commercial world to come, Clark notes. “He was a superstar at Yale,” she adds.

After Yale he earned a J.D. from the University of Michigan and served as an officer in the U.S. Navy.

He returned to New Haven and joined the white-shoe law firm of Wiggin & Dana, where in due time he made partner and became friends with senior partner C. Newton Schenck III, who would become a mentor to Tyler not just in the law, but in service to their home city and especially the advancement of arts and culture.

At Wiggin & Dana he became one of the most influential and respected attorneys in New Haven — but his interests extended well beyond the legal profession. “He was an enormously talented man,” Clark says, one who would later in life distinguish himself as a photographer, author and playwright.

Saving the Shubert

And, above all, as a philanthropist, community catalyst and good-deed-doer. Tyler is credited with almost single-handedly leading the drive to save the historic Shubert Performing Arts Center when it foundered financially in the 1980s. He also chaired the Arts Council and was a major force on the boards of directors of other cultural institutions including the New Haven Symphony Orchestra and Elm Shakespeare.

But Tyler was no mere dilettante; he was also a power player in the business community. In the 1980s he chaired the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce and also headed the board of the New Haven Foundation (today known as the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven).

When the Arts Council of Greater New Haven presented Tyler with its C. Newton Schenck III Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002, it called him “New Haven’s Renaissance Man.”

He was all that. And more. New Haven’s status as Connecticut’s cultural capital is the enduring legacy not just of Tyler’s vision but also his elbow grease. His Yale Man bona fides will forever include his Mory’s membership card, which was No. 001. “And of course he was enormously good-looking,” Clark adds.

A memorial service for Cheever Tyler will take place at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, September 14 at Trinity Church on the Green, New Haven.

— Michael C. Bingham

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