As an avid fly fisherman, Bud Godfrey appreciated the beauty of the outdoors. So when the Stanford Alumni Association was about to make its final decision on whether to acquire the Sierra Camp in 1959, he knew just what to do. As chairman of the SAA board's finance committee, he decided to bring fellow board members to Fallen Leaf Lake to meet. It worked.
"Bud was an artful and single-minded champion of the project," says Bill Stone, '67, MBA '69, SAA president.
It was the first of many major achievements for Godfrey that benefited the Stanford community. A native Californian, Godfrey was born and raised in South Pasadena. While an undergraduate at Stanford, he was president of Phi Delta Theta. He went on to study business, receiving his MBA in 1935, and served as the first president of the Business School Alumni Association and a founding trustee of the Business School Trust.
An entrepreneur whose principal business was running a chain of supermarkets in southern California, Godfrey also ran a cattle ranch in the Chino Hills for 30 years. He spent most of his summers at a dude ranch in Montana, although during the summer of 1967 he went on SAA's first-ever Travel/Study trip up the Rhine.
Godfrey liked to say he was most proud of his associations with Stanford and Saint Edmund's Church in San Marino, where he served for many years as vestryman and junior and senior warden. A loyal follower of Stanford sports, he was buried with an "I'm a Big Red Rooter" button inside his coat pocket. He died October 26 of heart failure in Pasadena and had a Dixieland memorial service. He is survived by three daughters, Susan Smock, '60, MA '61, Carol Marburger, '62, and Kate, '73; two sons-in-law, Jack Smock, '59, MBA '61, and John Marburger III, PhD '67, four grandchildren, including Molly Smock Lihani, '87. His wife, Margaret (Peg) Chase, '35, died in 1994.
