Osborne Day; CIA Officer, Fundraiser

Osborne A. Day, 87, a retired CIA officer who spent 34 years in a second career as a fundraiser for nonprofit organizations, died May 20 of sepsis at Sibley Memorial Hospital. He was a resident of the District.

Mr. Day, known as "Oz," was born in New Haven, Conn., and received his undergraduate degree from Yale University in 1943. He also received a master's degree in international affairs from George Washington University in 1973 and attended the National War College.

He served in the Army for eight years, four of them with the 10th Mountain Infantry. Immediately after World War II, he worked for J. Walter Thompson in New York and Scovill Manufacturing in Waterbury, Conn. Then, like a number of his Yale classmates, he joined the CIA. From 1951 to 1972, he was a senior operations officer in Afghanistan, Sudan, Thailand and Spain. For two years after his retirement from the agency, he worked on the National Security Council under then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger as a senior adviser on terrorism, Africa and the United Nations.

In 1974, Jack Castles, a Yale classmate and then-president of the organization now known as Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic, recruited Mr. Day to raise money for the nonprofit group. He also raised money for other nonprofit organizations serving the disabled and successfully pressed for the enactment of the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act.

In the mid-1970s, he joined a group of representatives of Washington churches to address the community needs of senior citizens. His advocacy and fundraising efforts led to the establishment of IONA Senior Services, an agency that provides community- and home-based professional and volunteer assistance to elderly people and their caregivers.

Working with the International Executive Service Corps, he also recruited retired executives to provide their expertise to developing countries. He served on President Ronald Reagan's Advisory Council on Private Sector Initiatives (1982-85) and represented the George H.W. Bush administration at the 1990 inauguration of the Surinam government and at the 1992 Winter Olympics at Albertville, France.

In 2005, he received a presidential appointment to the Javits-Wagner-O'Day Committee as a private citizen representing the interests of nonprofit agency employees who are blind or disabled. Programs provide employment opportunities for blind Americans and those with severe disabilities by arranging government purchases of products and other services from them. Mr. Day was a member of the committee at the time of his death.

Survivors include his wife of 51 years, Ester Day of the District; four daughters, Jane Day Rich of Highland Park, Ill, Leyla Ann Day of Boulder, Colo., Isabel Day Benson of Aspen, Colo., and Mary Day Fitzgibbon of Loudonville, N.Y.; and eight grandchildren.

-- Joe Holley