Richard Pearson, National Geographic official and Alfalfa Club stalwart, 92

Richard Pearson, the chief of diplomatic and civic affairs at the National Geographic Society who also was an officer with Washington’s Alfalfa Club and chairman for years of its annual VIP dinner, died May 25 at a health-care center in the District of Columbia. He was 92.

The cause was cancer, said Gregory Platts, a friend and fellow Alfalfan.

As a representative of National Geographic, Pearson cultivated relationships with top figures at foreign embassies and in the U.S. government, gaining access to remote, hardto-reach or forbidden places for the society’s photographers and writers.

He helped ease the way for National Geographic’s coverage of lunar landings, the discovery of the sunken wreck of the Titanic and the bringing of exhibits not seen before to the society’s museum in downtown Washington.

At the Alfalfa Club, Pearson’s duties included planning the club’s annual dinner – and the delicate diplomacy of assigning seats – for 700 highego leaders of government and business, almost all of whom believed they deserved a prestigious location at or near the head table. The club itself has about 200 members. Each is allowed to bring two guests to the annual dinner, held on the last Saturday in January. It has been the Alfalfa Club’s single annual event for 107 years.

Rarely does a year pass without someone complaining about a seat assignment, said Platts, the chairman of this year’s dinner who, in his day job, was treasurer at National Geographic.

Inevitably, the process is fraught with pitfalls and easily made mistakes. One year, just before the dinner, Pearson received a phone call from former president George H.W. Bush alerting him to the fact that the Chinese ambassador and the ambassador from Taiwan were both seated at the head table – socially awkward at the least, fuel for an international incident at worst. Appropriate seat changes were made.

Richard Esher Pearson, known as Dick, was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, on May 17, 1928, and grew up in Philadelphia’s Main Line suburbs. His father was a banker. The family traced its ancestry back to the 18th century, and Pearson was a member of the Society of the Sons of the Revolution, the Society of Colonial Wars and the Colonial Society of Pennsylvania.

He graduated from the private Haverford School and, in 1950, from the University of Pennsylvania. He served in the Army and in 1953 received a master’s degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He had lived in Washington since 1957, when he joined the staff of National Geographic. He retired from the society in 1994 as the de facto chief of protocol.