Alison Bruce Rea

Obituary Alison Bruce Rea

REA-Alison Bruce, died at home in Manhattan on June 28, 2024, aged 72 after a long and brave battle against cancer. In the 1980s Alison made her home in New York where she became a distinguished business journalist and bird watcher, well known to other birders in Central Park. She was also a very gifted artist and keenly interested in the decorative arts. At the same time as pursuing her career and interests, she diligently looked after her mother and aunt.

Alison was born on April 30, 1952, in Washington DC and raised in Denver where her parents moved in 1953: Howard Rea was a well-known tax lawyer and her mother Elizabeth Drayton (of Washington DC) was a direct descendant of John Drayton, an early governor and federal judge of South Carolina.

In Denver, Alison attended Graland Country Day School. When her mother remarried and returned to Washington DC, Alison finished high school at the National Cathedral School for Girls (class of 1970). She graduated cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania in 1973 with a degree in Communications: filmmaking.

A superb skier, she took time out to work at the Angel Fire resort in Eagle Nest New Mexico and then became the sole teacher in a one room primary school in Bondurant Wyoming. In 1977 she moved to New York where she received a degree in primary education from Adelphi University (1978) and then taught for two years at the Rudolph Steiner School in Manhattan.

In 1980, Alison made the life-changing decision to get an MBA in finance and international business at New York University which paved the way to her career covering business and banking over the next three decades. In 1982 she started at Fortune Magazine as a fact checker and in 1985 was promoted to the international finance team.

Early on in her career, Alison showed a knack for getting along with leading CEOS. In 1984 when John Reed became head of Citicorp, Alison won him over at his very first press conference. Instead of the usual sort of question about strategy, she asked him what number Grecian Formula he used on his hair. He laughed and from then on, called on Alison every time. She formed a lasting friendship with the Reeds and other banking leaders without ever compromising her journalistic independence

In 1987 Alison moved to the New York office of Reuters where she became the US banking correspondent for eight years, a job that she loved and that brought her many life-long friends. In 1996, Business Week recruited Alison to be the Money and Banking editor but in 1997 she joined the New York office of the Economist Intelligence Unit where she wrote Global Investment Banking Strategy: Insights from Industry Leaders (published 1998) and served as the US editor of the EIU Strategic Finance Quarterly Review. Thereafter she wrote international finance and trade reports for the EIU as well as several of the 'Big Four' Accounting firms and consultancies such as McKinsey and CFO Services.

A love of birds meant that Alison never had less than six 'budgies' who were allowed to fly freely around the kitchen of her Riverside Drive apartment. Such was her gift of storytelling, that tales of the birds and their love lives could reduce her most ornithophobic friends to a fit of giggles.

Her passion for textiles and ceramics took her to Central Asia but especially to Turkey where she made friends despite her limited command of the language, her only phrase in Turkish being 'I have six birds'. On her first trip there, she met some top ceramicists at an artists' fair. She persuaded the assistant of the renowned 'Iznik' master, Mehmet Gursoy that she needed to study with him even though he rarely took on apprentices. On trips thereafter, she took the five-hour bus ride from Istanbul to Kutahya to stay in a family run hotel for a week or two while studying with Gursoy. The result was a series of beautiful, perfectly executed painted pottery inspired by the patterns of Iznik ware.

In New York, Alison was a member of the Cosmopolitan Club but belonged to the Cosmos Club in Washington DC where she had a wide circle of friends. She also was a longtime supporter of Drayton Hall in South Carolina, which reflected her keen interest in the history of her Drayton ancestors.

To her immense credit, Alison managed all the affairs of her mother and her aunt Dorothea Drayton, paying close attention to their emotional as well as health needs. Both lived well into their nineties and it is profoundly sad that Alison did not live to the same great age.

She is survived by her brothers Malcolm Dunbar Rea, John Drayton Rea, her nephew Nicholas Edwards, step-siblings Phoebe Barnard, Anne Barnard, Robin Angly and step-nephew Hart Fukutomi.