Naval Medals from the Collection of the Late Jason Pilalas
Jason Pilalas
Jason was born in Norwalk, Connecticut, USA and grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. His love of all things nautical stemmed from his service as an officer in the United States Navy, with whom he completed three tours of Vietnam. It was whilst serving in the Navy that he met his future wife Rena, to whom he was happily married for 55 years, becoming the proud father of two children, Debbie and Troy and subsequently a happy grandfather to his two grandchildren.
Jason was an accomplished scholar, attending the University of Southern California and later graduating from Harvard Business School. Following his service with the United States Navy, Jason’s career took him to Capital Group in Los Angeles, an investment management firm, where, during a 36 year career, he specialised as an Investment Analyst in the pharmaceutical and medical products sector. Jason was known to have been an outstanding pharmaceutical analyst, described by his colleagues as being a committed and fearless investor who understood his industry better than anyone.
Jason’s generosity was surpassed only by his razor sharp wit, which those who knew him understood could come out of nowhere at the most unlikeliest of times. He was not only a man of many talents, but he was also a man of many interests, none more so than his relentless pursuit of knowledge of all things relating to the Royal Navy. This voracious appetite for knowledge being matched only by his seemingly unquenchable thirst to collect objects relating to his passion
Never one to do things by halves, Jason was not someone to be put off by the size or weight of an object, whether it be a ship’s bell of which he amassed a collection of many hundreds or a giant ship’s nameplate, Jason would find somewhere to display it, even if it did mean buying a lighthouse to put much of it in, as he did in 1991 when he and Rena purchased and lovingly restored the lighthouse at Morgan Point, Noank, Connecticut.
So it was against this backdrop in October 1996 that Jason happened across Dix Noonan Webb, as we were then known, at which time we were selling the unsurpassed (until now) collection of Naval Medals belonging to the late Captain K. J. Douglas-Morris. Jason could not resist and made his first medal purchases in this auction and from that moment on became a die-hard medal collector. In medals Jason had discovered something small and portable that not only satisfied his interest in the tangible, but also the personal stories that came with them that touched on so many areas of British naval history, about which he knew so much.
In the following 27 years Jason assembled an incredible collection of naval medals, which he vigorously tracked down and purchased from all over the world to complement his many other nautical collecting themes. As much as Jason cherished his collection he was always mindful of the fact that he was just the custodian of these objects in his own lifetime. There is no doubt, therefore, that he would have been very happy to know that the items in his collection will now be finding new homes with a new generation of collectors who will appreciate them as much as he did.
ND & PN July 2024
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