The man who led Western Asset Management Company through its sale to Legg Mason died on Tuesday.

Stephen Miller of Bloomberg reports that W. Curtis Livingston III, 71, died from pancreatic cancer. He lived in Nantucket, Massachusetts.

Born in Indiana with an architect father and a librarian mother, Livingston grew up in Kentucky. An alumnus of Duke and Dartmouth, Livingston worked at the Ford Foundation, Fischer Francis Tree & Watts, and Fidelity before joining Wamco in 1981 as senior vice president and director of fixed income management. At the time Wamco was a unit of First Interstate Bank.

Livingston took over as Wamco's president and CEO in 1983, and oversaw its $18-million sale to Legg Mason [profile] in 1986. At the time of the deal, Wamco had $3.5 billion in assets under management. 10 years later Wamco bought Lehman Brothers Global Asset Management and rebranded it Western Asset Global Management. By the time Livingston retired in 1999, Wamco's AUM had multiplied by a factor of 14 to $50 billion. Since then its AUM has increased nearly another ten-fold, to $471.6 billion. It is Legg's largest unit.

Livingston was an avid stamp collector and helped out with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Nantucket Atheneum public library, and the Smithsonian National Postal Museum. Livingston is survived by his son, William Livingston IV; his daugher, Molly Paiement; his sister, Ann Wainscott; and four grandchildren. His wife, Pamela, died four years ago. 

Edited by: Neil Anderson, Managing Editor


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