Alexander Smith Cochran

Alexander Smith Cochran was one of those successful business men to whom the giving away of money is a far greater delight than the accumulation of it. His gifts to Yale, his Alma Mater, and to the town of Yonkers where he spent his active life, were his special pleasure; but the war made the strongest claim on his spirit of generosity. He gave a quarter of a million dollars to the British Red Cross and an equal sum to the French hospital organization. He equipped a hospital train of 15 cars for the British government and supplied a hospital of 100 beds at Kew for wounded English soldiers. Not content with giving money, he went to Berlin to serve as unpaid courier for the American Embassy in our period of neutrality, where his efforts on behalf of the Allied prisoners brought him into such collision with the German authorities that he was on one occasion sentenced to be shot at daybreak and rescued only at the last moment by our own ambassador.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1930 Century Association Yearbook