Obituaries
Peter Ridley Sperling
Peter Ridley Sperling of Wellington, FL, died on Sunday, January 5, 2014, at the Hospice of Palm Beach County, following complications suffered as the result of a serious accident the previous year.
Mr. Sperling was born in 1931 in Madison, WI, the son of the late Mr. and Mrs. Jerome Sperling (Gertrude Ridley). The family soon moved to New Haven, CT, where his father began teaching at Yale. Mr. Sperling spent his youth there, attending Worthington Hooker Grade School together with many other “faculty children.”
He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1949, Harvard in 1953, and Yale Law School in 1956, and was a member of the Massachusetts Bar Association. At Yale he founded and was the first chairman of the Conservative Society of the Law School.
Mr. Sperling worked at New England Merchants Bank (now the Bank of New England) as a trust officer for nine years until he joined Citibank, N.A., in 1982. During his career at Citibank, he became a vice president and was also senior marketing director and deputy head of its international private banking division until his retirement in 1995. On retirement, he and a close associate, Robbie Meyjes, founded Meyjes-Sperling Associates, a private banking consultancy firm. While residing in Hong Kong in the early 1970s, and for years thereafter, he wrote a monthly financial column for Insight magazine and spent many hours training Citibank staff in the field of private banking.
Mr. Sperling was a former member of the Racquet and Tennis Club, the Union Boat Club, Bedford Golf and Tennis Club, and the Harvard Club.
He is survived by Mrs. Sperling (Lewis—Edwina W. Van Winkle); his daughter, Ridley Whitehouse Sperling of Pleasantville, NY; and his brother, David Colton Sperling of Nairobi, Kenya.