Born Stirling Auchincloss Colgate on Nov. 14, 1925, in New York City, to Henry Auchincloss Colgate (of toothpaste company fame) and Jeanette Thurber (n´ee Pruyn) Colgate, he attended and graduated from the Los Alamos Ranch School. This is the place General Leslie Groves and Robert Oppenheimer chose in the fall of 1942 to be the initial site of the Los Alamos Laboratory of the Manhattan Project. When Oppenheimer made an incognito visit to the Ranch School with Ernest O. Lawrence, Stirling in fact recognized them as famous nuclear scientists and suspected that the school was being taken over to build an atomic bomb