Sidney Dillon Ripley

His mother was Constance Baillie Rose of Scottish descent while his father was Louis Arthur Dillon Ripley, a wealthy real estate agent who drove around in an 1898 Renault Voiturette.

Both his paternal grandparents, Julia and Josiah Dwight Ripley, died before he was born but he was connected to them through Cora Dillon Wyckoff.

Great Aunt Cora and her husband, Dr. Peter Wyckoff, often hosted young Ripley at their Park Avenue apartment.

Cora's and Julia's father (his great-grandfather) and partial namesake was Sidney Dillon, twice President of the Union Pacific Railroad.

and his uncle was Sidney Dillon Ripley I.

Both Gilded Age tycoons.

Ripley's early education was at the Montessori Kindergarten School on Madison Avenue.

As a young boy, he traveled widely including to British Columbia where his mother's relatives lived.

Ripley was born in New York City, after a brother, Louis, was born in 1906 in Litchfield, Connecticut.

Sidney Dillon Ripley II (September 20, 1913 – March 12, 2001) was an American ornithologist and wildlife conservationist.

In April 1918, his mother, who had separated from his father, moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In 1919 the family moved again to Boston, where he studied in a school called Rivers.

At the age of ten, he traveled again with his mother across Europe.

In 1924 Ripley went to a boarding school called Fay in Southborough, Massachusetts.

In 1926 he followed in Louis' footsteps, attending St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire.

In 1936, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Yale University.

While at Yale he briefly considered a more traditional career path after a conversation with his brother.

"Louis told me we ought to have a lawyer in the family," he has said, "but I really hated the idea, and in the summer of 1936, after graduating from college, I resolved to abandon all thoughts of a prosperous and worthy future and devote myself to birds, the subject I was overpoweringly interested in."

A friend of the Ripleys, John, whose father founded the Young Men's Christian Association, and Celestine Mott were planning a visit to India to set up a YMCA hostel in India.

This led to a visit to India at age 13, along with his sister.

They stayed at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay and then went to Kashmir and included a walking tour into Ladakh and western Tibet.

In Kashmir, they flew falcons with Colonel Biddulph.

They also visited Calcutta and Nagpur.

One of Ripley's brothers shot a tiger at a shoot hosted by a Maharaja.

This led to his lifelong interest in the birds of India.

He returned to St Paul's to complete his studies.

It was suggested to him that Yale would be the best for him.

Ripley received a training in making specimens from Frank Chapman and even had tea once as a sophomore Erwin Stresemann.

He decided that birds were more interesting than law and after graduating from Yale in 1936 he was advised by Ernst Mayr that "the most important thing you can do is get a sound and broad biological training."

He then enrolled at Columbia University.

and he began studying zoology at Columbia University.

As a part of his study, Ripley participated in the Denison-Crockett Expedition to New Guinea in 1937-1938 and the Vanderbilt Expedition to Sumatra in 1939.

He later obtained a PhD in Zoology from Harvard University in 1943.

During World War II, he served under William J. Donovan ("Coordinator of Information") in the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency.

In the early days Ripley acted as liaison with the British Security Coordination led by Sir William Stephenson at the Rockefeller Center.

He later was in charge of American intelligence services in Southeast Asia.

Others who joined the OSS early included Ripley's Yale friends Sherman Kent and Wilmarth S. Lewis.

Ripley held a high regard for his OSS colleagues and considered it unfair on the part of some to decry those who were socially inclined leading to some calling the organization as "Oh So Social".

He served as secretary of the Smithsonian Institution for 20 years, from 1964 to 1984, leading the institution through its period of greatest growth and expansion.

For his leadership at the Smithsonian, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan in 1985.