Harry Selby Hunt

September 29, 1926 - December 11, 2023

With love and appreciation, we celebrate the life of Harry Selby Hunt who left us after a brief illness at age 97 on December 11, 2023, in Moos, Lindau, Germany.

Harry was the personification of a bygone era of elegance and grace. He possessed a youthfulness which led one to believe that he would outlive us all. And he deserved to do so based on his sort of character, to which any of us would aspire; good-natured, relentlessly curious and energetic, well read and widely informed and with charm and humor to spare. Handsome, athletic, stylish, and possessing an impeccable eye, Harry was a natural; at home in the humblest or most elevated of circumstance and company. He was utterly modern, though perfectly cast for forties Hollywood, and with a life reflective of this.

Born in 1926, the son of Harry Cole Hunt and Jane Selby Hunt, Harry grew up as a young cowboy on a ranch in the foothills of Big Sur and spent his youth in the atmospheric thirties of Steinbeck’s Monterey peninsula. His many varied chapters included time as a marine serving in the South Pacific at the close of WWII, witnessing the battle of Iwo Jima aboard the USS Nashville, the first allied ship to arrive in Shanghai to accept the surrender of occupying Japanese forces. He subsequently received his education at UC Berkeley and the Sorbonne in Paris in the late forties, after which he joined Crocker National Bank in San Francisco, opening and running their branch in Brussels and focused on currency arbitrage long before the concept was widely known. He moved on to Tunisa in the sixties as an attaché to the American International Development Corp, responsible for their cultural mission in Sidi Bou Said.

Harry returned home to San Francisco’s North Beach where he was a regular at Tosca, Ernie’s and Vanessi’s among a roster of California’s social, cultural, and political elite. He was in many ways not only the spirit of San Francisco, but of the whole of California from Monterey to Eureka, where his agile sociability gained him entrée as an honorary fellow among a far-flung cadre of admirers from architects and filmmakers to poets and venture capitalists. During this period, he rekindled his love for motorcycle racing, pioneering the development of competition motorcycle brake componentry. He remained an avid and intrepid rider; in his late 60s rolling over the roof of a van driving in the wrong lane on the Pacific Coast Highway and landing on his feet, unharmed. He rode on into his 70s, celebrating his 70th birthday on his Ducati riding through Death Valley and Yosemite.

Harry found meaning and peacefulness in his life through his wife Monika and her family, splitting his time between Telegraph Hill and the Lake of Constance in Germany. He is survived by Monika; her daughter, Antonia; and sons, Andi and Christian; and a daughter, Natasha, from a prior marriage. True to form, he remained a bright light, embracing life and all those he encountered until his final farewell.

There will be a privately held celebration of life on a later date.