Stokley Towles’s 50-year career at BBH might never have happened had he followed his first thought upon graduating from Princeton in 1957 to become a teacher or headmaster of a school. A stint in sales with a telephone company taught him that he preferred concrete measures of success or failure in business, although Harvard Business School and its case method also showed him that business was not so black and white.

In 1960, Towles joined BBH’s Boston office, where, along with Noah Herndon and Anthony Enders, he set out to shift the Boston banking business from commodities financing to middle- market lending. “Stokley was an extraordinary new business guy and kind of creative thinker,” recalled Enders. “He was out pounding the pavement all the time.”

This enterprising instinct helped Towles create his most lasting legacy at BBH—global custody.

In the early 1970s, most banks thought of the custody and safekeeping of foreign securities for U.S. mutual funds as a kind of backwater. Not Towles, who saw BBH—with a keen antenna for risk and an intimate knowledge of foreign markets, regulations, and currency transactions—as uniquely suited for this sort of business.

When a major mutual fund company first asked whether BBH could help administer foreign securities for its first international fund, Towles immediately said yes, without knowing for sure how to do it. But he figured it out, and this same can-do spirit became an inspiration for BBH, which went on to build one of the world’s leading global custody operations.

Towles certainly did his part, becoming a lifetime mentor to many BBHers, with a special interest in the success of women. In 1989, Kristen Giarrusso had already accepted another job offer when Towles called her one Saturday morning at 7:00 a.m. “If you were engaged to be married,” he asked her, “and you knew in your heart it was the wrong person, would you follow through just because you had made a commitment?”

A few years later, Susan Livingston had just landed the first big account for the new Luxembourg office, only for the Steering Committee to raise concerns about the tax implications of the deal. “Don’t worry,” Towles said. “Stick with it. Success is the best revenge. Just keep doing what you’re doing.”

What made Towles such a gifted mentor was his love for people, symbolized in one daily ritual.

Every morning on his way to work, usually in his trademark gray suit and fedora, he stopped by a coffee shop in Boston’s Faneuil Hall for a double shot tall skim latte. Then he took a seat on the bench outside, where he would strike up a conversation with anyone. “His friends could find him there,” recalled his son, the novelist Amor Towles. “I could find him there. Over the course of a year, he’d see everybody, which was the whole point.”