Newsmaker

Every Friday, we choose an alum who has been making headlines—for better or for worse.
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11/4/11: William Orville DeWitt Jr. ’63

By the staff | 1:56pm January 03 2012

William Orville DeWitt Jr. ’63 and George Walker Bush ’68 didn’t overlap as Yale students. But the two men have quite a bit in common.

Sons of famous fathers (Bill DeWitt Sr. owned the old St. Louis Browns baseball team), they each earned a Harvard MBA. They merged their oil businesses. They co-owned the Texas Rangers. DeWitt raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Bush’s presidential campaigns and sat on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (known as Piffy-Ab, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer).

Bush and his father both played baseball at Yale. But DeWitt (whose family name graces the Yale softball field) grew up in the big leagues. And on October 28, he claimed his second World Series ring as chairman and majority owner of the St. Louis Cardinals, who triumphed over those very same Texas Rangers in St. Louis’s Busch (note the letter c) Stadium.

Days later, DeWitt and Cardinals general manager John Mozeliak are interviewing candidates to replace skipper Tony La Russa, who announced his retirement after the championship parade. Meanwhile, the dynasty’s next generation—team president William “Billy” DeWitt III, Yale Class of 1990—is scaling back a Cardinals’ downtown real estate venture in hopes it won’t become a House of Cards.

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