Deceased April 15, 2005
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In Memory
Mike Colglazier died on April 15, 2005, after a three-year battle with colon cancer. He died peacefully at his home in Lutherville, Md., in hospice care, surrounded by his wife, Sian; his two sons, Tristan and Gareth; and his two daughters, Meriel and Cerys. A few days later, a memorial service was held in Old St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Baltimore with approximately 1,100 people in attendance.
Mike was born in Richmond, Va., and attended high school in Bel Air, Md., near Baltimore, where he was the quintessential high school star: an outstanding student, a class leader and a running back with enough shifty moves to lead the State of Maryland in scoring his senior year.
Mike arrived at Amherst with a low-key personality, a dry wit, a certain southern charm and a trunk load of Motown record albums. He played on the freshman football team, but in the spring of his freshman year, he discovered rugby, which became his athletic passion for the rest of his college career. Despite his lack of size, speed or great athleticism, he distinguished himself at the scrum half position (the rugby equivalent of quarterback) on some outstanding Amherst teams. Mike particularly liked the rugby tradition of partying with the opposing teams after matches. Though cut, battered and bruised from taking hits nearly every time he touched the ball, he liked the idea of sipping a couple of beers while getting to know the opponents who had just recently been beating up on him and exchanging verses to bawdy, but clever, rugby songs.
During the summer between his junior and senior years, Mike worked in the A Better Chance (ABC) program, serving as a tutor and counselor for smart but disadvantaged high school students of color, most from inner-city areas. Mike’s experience with the ABC program had a profound effect on him. At his Amherst graduation, he was awarded the coveted “Green Dean” position in the admission office. Mike used the job as an opportunity to work inside of the admission process to identify, recruit and champion the admission of disadvantaged and minority students. During that year, Ed Wall, then dean of admission, became a friend and mentor, someone Mike saw as a quintessential intellectual/Renaissance man whose thoughtful approach and wide-ranging interests Mike came to emulate in his own life.
From Amherst, Mike went on to obtain a law degree from the University of Virginia in 1974, then moved to Baltimore where he joined the Miles & Stockbridge law firm. In Baltimore, he met and married Sian Jones, then working as an art conservator at the Walters Art Gallery (now Museum). Mike advanced to partner at Miles & Stockbridge, but in 1988, he was recruited away to join with several other local attorneys to set up the new Baltimore office of Hogan & Hartson, a distinguished Washington, D.C.-based firm. It was a controversial defection because it represented the first time a national law firm had infiltrated the Baltimore legal market.
Mike’s legal career encompassed a wide variety of subjects and issues, but he developed a particular expertise in banking litigation and bankruptcy law. In an obituary published in the Baltimore Sun on April 17, 2005, Stephen Immelt, managing partner of Hogan & Hartson, was quoted as saying, “Mike had a facile mind, and he thrived on complexity. The bigger the mess and the bigger the problem, the more he loved it.”
Perhaps his most recognized professional work was his service in recent years as general counsel to the Baltimore Ravens professional football team and legal advisor to Art Modell, the majority owner of the team. In the Baltimore Sun obituary, Art Modell is quoted as saying, “Over the years I have worked with a lot of attorneys, but I don’t recall any with his skill, competence and enormously high level of integrity.”
Mike maintained a dry wit and a mischievous personality throughout his life. He was not one to maintain order, make elaborate plans or keep to schedules, preferring spontaneity and impulsive adventure. Mark Saudek, a fellow partner at Hogan & Hartson quoted in the Baltimore Sun, described “his office as a museum of papers, pleadings, memorabilia and miscellany. It was impenetrable to the outside world, but neatly catalogued in his head. He was fond of saying, ‘A clean office is the sign of a cluttered mind.’” His friends, professional colleagues and clients knew Mike as a man with a wide knowledge of art, literature, sports, wine and movies. And everyone noticed what one colleague referred to as his “fluid, extensive vocabulary.” Conversations with Mike often resulted in listeners heading for a dictionary to find out what he had just said.
Mike was a great believer in the importance of athletics in children’s lives to help them develop their bodies and their values. And he was a strong advocate for inclusion and diversity in youth sports. He volunteered in the local Lutherville-Timonium Recreation Council coaching youth soccer and basketball teams and playing in the adult leagues himself.
Confronted with what he knew was his final illness, Mike nonetheless was determined to take his family on one last vacation this spring. He wanted once more to sit under a palm tree on a tropical beach, feel the warm breezes off the ocean and have his family around him. Though very ill and in a lot of pain, Mike made the trip to the small, remote island of Bequia in the Grenadines and got to sit under a palm tree as he wished. For the memorial service, his family brought in a seven-foot tall plastic brown and green lighted palm tree and set it up in front of the altar. The tree had been a gift from Sian to Mike as part of a family tradition of tropical themes for Christmas decoration. The tree signified Mike’s indomitable spirit, his whimsical sense of humor and his love for his family.
Thomas Gilliss ’70