Frederick B Dent

Frederick B. Dent, a South Carolina textile manufacturer who in the mid-1970s was President Richard M. Nixon’s secretary of commerce and President Gerald R. Ford’s special representative for United States trade negotiations, died on December 10 2019 in Spartanburg, S.C. He was 97. His daughter, Pauline Dent Ketchum, confirmed the death, at the Spartanburg Medical Center, on Monday. Frederick Baily Dent was born in Cape May, N.J., on Aug. 17, 1922, to Magruder and Edith (Baily) Dent. He grew up in Greenwich, Conn., and attended St. Paul’s School in Concord, N.H. At Yale, Mr. Dent, an honor student, majored in government, played varsity football and hockey and, with academics compressed because of World War II, graduated in 1943. In 1944, he married Mildred Harrison. They had five children. Besides his daughter, Ms. Ketchum, he is survived by two sons, Frederick Jr. and Magruder; two daughters, Mildred Stuart and Diana McGraw; 14 grandchildren; and 13 great-grandchildren. His wife died in 1997.