Balfour Henry Golden ’44 died on November 11, 2005, in Ridgewood, New Jersey.
Born on August 23, 1922, in Bangor, he prepared for college at Bangor High School and graduated from Bowdoin cum laude and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa in June of 1943 as a member of the Class of 1944. At the time of his graduation, he was in the U.S. Army studying Hungarian at Indiana University in the Army Specialized Training Program. After two years in the Army during World War II, he did two years of graduate work at Columbia University in New York City Graduate School of Business. In 1947, he managed food service facilities during the construction and development of Brookhaven National Laboratory, which had been established to explore uses of atomic energy for peaceful purposes. He was vice president of S.H. Golden Corporation in New York City from 1947 to 1951, when he became president of Golden Food Services. From 1974 until his retirement in 1985, he was president of Guardian Food Services Corporation in New York, which operated The Assembly Steakhouse. At one time he owned about a dozen restaurants, cafés, and other eateries at Rockefeller Center, as well as a corporate catering business. He served on the board of the New York Restaurant Association. He played violin with a Ridgewood (NJ) group called the Hobbyists and with a Wyckoff (NJ) group called Activities Unlimited. He was married in 1956 to Emma Jane Krakauer, who died in 2000, and is survived by two sons, Peter Golden and Robert Golden; a daughter, Betsy G. Rosengren of Glen Rock, NJ; and three grandchildren.