10/08/2017
Rest In Peace, Washington Z. SyCip.
We lost a great man today, Mr. Washington SyCip (1921-2017), founder of the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) and the accounting firm SGV & Company. He trained generations of professionals and was mentor to numerous business leaders in the Philippines and overseas.
As his enduring achievements are remembered and celebrated today, we also remember his ties to the metro DC area, as documented in his 2009 biography written by Jose Dalisay. For example, he studied cryptography in Warrenton, VA (about an hour’s drive from DC) early in 1942 and later served alongside American and British cryptographers in India, breaking the intercepted messages of enemy soldiers. He also taught accounting for a semester at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, VA in 1946 after the war ("It was very relaxing," he once said of that semester) while living in the college's Phi Beta Kappa House. More recently, he served as Honorary Chair of the US-Philippines Society.
One tangible and permanent link to the DC area--his name. In June 1921, his father Albino SyCip was in DC to argue a case against a new bookkeeping law during the US colonial period that put local Philippine accountants at a disadvantage. In addition to Mr. Dalisay's account, we found in the archives accounts of Mr. SyCip's father's trip to DC, including a 1920 photograph, and shared them with Mr. SyCip in 2015.
He replied:
"I can't quite thank you enough for the articles that you have sent. The first one was dated May 20, 1921 reported that my father was going to have a case in Washington, DC. The second article about his hosting a dinner [at the New Willard] in Washington, DC was on July 23, 1921. I was born on June 30, 1921 and my father had won the case at that time and have therefore named me Washington because he was in the city of Washington, DC.
I have never seen these articles before so this is something that I will pass on to the rest of the family.
Wash"
In Mr. Dalisay's biography of Mr. SyCip, he recounts a joke often told by Mr. SyCip's brother David: "Up to now Wash has semi-annual recurring bad dreams about what might have happened if the old man had been in Buffalo, Walla Walla or Vladivostok."
Photo credit: Two pages from Mr. Dalisay's (2009) biography of Mr. SyCip. Photo of Mr. SyCip at Columbia University where he was a graduate student just before the Second World War.
