Stanley Ballinger; president boosted endowment at N.E. Conservatory

Stanley Ballinger started his career as a violinist.

The son of a Methodist minister, Stanley Ballinger could have stayed in the Midwest of his youth and followed a familial path.

"Stan came into the world on a Sunday morning, and my father always thought that he was going be another preacher," said his sister, Orienne Maloney of La Jolla, Calif.

Instead of the pulpit, Dr. Ballinger chose to ply his trade on the stage, the conductor's podium, and in the president's office at New England Conservatory. He later filled sheaves of paper with writings about his lifelong spiritual journey.

A violinist and music educator who succeeded the legendary conductor Gunther Schuller as president of New England Conservatory, Dr. Ballinger had largely stepped away from music during the past couple of decades and devoted himself to the teachings of Meher Baba, a spiritual teacher from India.

Dr. Ballinger was working on the forward to a book about his own spiritual studies when he collapsed at his West Palm Beach, Fla., home on Nov. 1 and died. He was 82.

"Stan Ballinger was a very warm, very genuine, very humane person," said Laurence Lesser, the president emeritus of New England Conservatory who had succeeded Dr. Ballinger as head of the school. "He cared deeply about music and education of young musicians. I think that informed everything he tried to do. He came to the conservatory just in the wake of Gunther Schuller's presidency, which had been a very heady time. The school needed a sober hand, which he really tried to provide."

During his tenure as president from 1977 to 1982, Dr. Ballinger brought high-profile violinists such as Dorothy DeLay and Josef Gingold and flutist Julius Baker to teach at the conservatory.

A five-year joint bachelor's degree program with Tufts University was created while Dr. Ballinger was president, and his leadership was seen as a key part of erasing the school's debt. Under Dr. Ballinger's predecessor, the school expanded its artistic ambitions but accumulated a deficit of nearly $750,000, conservatory officials said in 1981, when Dr. Ballinger said he would step down the following year.

"That deficit was completely eliminated last June," Andrew Falendar, who was then vice president at the conservatory, said in August 1981. "More important we've managed to double our endowment from under $3.5 million in 1975 to $7.5 million in 1981. . . . Stan deserves much of the credit."

The youngest of three children, James Stanley Ballinger was born in Liberal, Kan. Inspired by his father, a bluegrass fiddler, he was 9 when he began taking violin lessons.

After graduating from high school, he served as a Navy pilot then went to Wichita State University, where in 1950 he received a degree in violin. Two years later, he received a master's in violin from Oberlin Conservatory. While attending college, he also met the woman he would marry.

"He married Lee shortly after they were out of college," Dr. Ballinger's sister said. "She had been a child prodigy on violin.

"She was a lovely girl. She had platinum blonde hair without doing anything to it in college. They made quite a couple, him with his black hair and her with her white hair."

Beginning his career at Fort Hayes State College in Kansas, Dr. Ballinger taught conducting and string instruments and was orchestra director. He went back to Oberlin, where he was assistant dean, then acting dean of the conservatory. Returning to the classroom, he received a doctorate in conducting at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Dr. Ballinger once took a class from the renowned conductor Eugene Ormandy and "he was so proud that Ormandy said, 'You have the master's touch,' " his sister said.

In 1965, Dr. Ballinger began a dozen years as chairman of the music department at Northern Illinois University, where he turned a school that had been known primarily for training music educators into a place that groomed performers, said Larry J. Livingston, a conducting professor and music director of the orchestras at Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California.

Livingston had worked with Dr. Ballinger at Northern Illinois and followed him to New England Conservatory.

"In the nearly ten years I worked with Stan, I never saw him lose his temper, nor back down when he knew he was right," Livingston wrote in a tribute to his friend. "And I never saw him hurt another human being. His benevolence and fertile genius for supposing the fantastic made him uniquely ingratiating and enchanting."

Said his sister, "I can just remember his big laugh. I'd send an e-mail to him or call him to tell him something funny just to hear him laugh. It would make me feel good all over."

Lee Ballinger was ill when the family moved from Illinois to Boston but had encouraged Dr. Ballinger to take the position at New England Conservatory, his sister said. Dr. Ballinger's wife died of cancer not long after he became president.

"I think that when she died, it colored the rest of his time here," Lesser said. "It's another mark of the humaneness of the man that he had that great love for her, and it really knocked him for a loop."

When he stepped down as president, Dr. Ballinger began concentrating on his spiritual studies, traveling several times to India and living in South Carolina, where followers of Meher Baba have built a center.

"All of us in the family were just struck by the intensity of his spiritual study, and that prompted us all to look into that area of existence ourselves," said his great-niece Jennifer Lucht, a cellist in Boston. "He was definitely a seeker."

In addition to his sister, Dr. Ballinger leaves a son, David of Norman, Okla., and a daughter, Susan of Beloit, Wis.

A service will be announced.