The Harvard Glee Club went on Far Eastern Tour in 1961 which came on the heels of the Time Magazine feature on the King in 1960.

King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand, who took the throne of the kingdom once known as Siam shortly after World War II and held it for more than 70 years, establishing himself as a revered personification of Thai nationhood, died on Thursday in Bangkok. He was 88 and one of the longest-reigning monarchs in history.

The royal palace said he died at Siriraj Hospital but gave no further details.

King Bhumibol was a unifying figure in a deeply polarized country, and his death cast a pall of uncertainty across Thailand, raising questions about the future of the monarchy itself.

The military junta, which seized power in a coup two years ago, derives its authority from the king. But the king’s heir apparent, Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn, seen by many as a jet-setting playboy, is not held in the same regard as his father.

King Bhumibol spent most of his final years in a hospital, ensconced in a special suite. His portrait hung in almost every shop, and as his health declined, billboards proclaimed “Long Live the King,” signaling widespread anxiety about a future without him. In response, he openly fretted about the people feeling so insecure.

Thais came to see this Buddhist king as a father figure wholly dedicated to their welfare, and as the embodiment of stability in a country where political leadership rose and fell through decades of military coups.

His death ends a reign of 70 years and 126 days, one that few monarchs have matched for longevity. Queen Elizabeth II, by comparison, has ruled Britain for more than 64 years, having surpassed Queen Victoria’s mark in 2015. With King Bhumibol’s death, she becomes the world’s longest-reigning monarch.

King Bhumibol (pronounced poo-me-pon) was an accidental monarch, thrust onto the throne at 18 by the violent death of his older brother in 1946. He fully embraced the role of national patriarch, upholding Thailand’s traditions of hierarchy, deference and loyalty.

Western stereotypes of his country irked him. He disdained the Broadway musical “The King and I,” with its roots in his grandfather’s court. And, like a stern father, he was quick to chastise his fellow Thais when he saw the need.

In the king’s own book “The Story of Tongdaeng” (2002), about a street dog he had adopted, the message — there was always a message in his writings — was that affluent Thais should stop buying expensive foreign breeds when there were so many local strays to save. The book was a Thai best-seller.

If he was a people’s king, Bhumibol was a quiet and somewhat aloof one. He was a man of sober, serious mien, often isolated in his palaces, protected by the most stringent of lèse-majesté laws, which effectively prevent almost any public discussion of the royal family.

But he had a worldly bent. Born in Cambridge, Mass., where his father was a student at Harvard, he was educated in Switzerland, spoke impeccable English and French, composed music, played jazz on the clarinet and saxophone, wrote, painted, took up photography and spent hours in a greenhouse at his Chitrlada Palace in Bangkok.

Once he had returned from Europe, however, he stayed put. Never interested in a jet-set life, he stopped traveling abroad, saying there was too much to do at home. He was content to trudge through croplands in distant provinces in an open-neck shirt and sport coat, tending to the many development projects he encouraged and oversaw: milk-pasteurizing plants, dams that watered rice fields, factories that recycled sugar-cane stalks and water hyacinths into fuel, and countless others.

In a political crisis, Thais admired him for his shrewd sense of when to intervene — sometimes with only a gesture — to defuse it, even though he had only a limited constitutional role and no direct political power.

“We are fighting in our own house,” he scolded two warring politicians he had summoned to sit abjectly at his feet in 1992. “It is useless to live on burned ruins.”

Eleven years earlier, he had aborted a coup by simply inviting the besieged prime minister, Prem Tinsulanonda, to stay at a royal palace with the king and queen.

Thailand was transformed during his reign, moving from a mostly agricultural economy to a modern one of industry and commerce and a growing middle class. He presided over an expansion of democratic processes, though it was halting. He witnessed a dozen successful military coups and several attempted uprisings, and in his last years, his health failing, he appeared powerless to stem sometimes violent demonstrations, offering only vague appeals for unity and giving royal endorsement to two coups.

Meanwhile a strain of republicanism emerged as the country broke into two camps: on one side, the establishment, with the palace at its core; on the other, the disenfranchised, whose demand for a political voice threatened the traditional order.

Between them was the king, a calming symbol of unity — so much so that at times he wanted to moderate the country’s almost obsessive veneration of him.

In his annual birthday address in December 2001, King Bhumibol said, “There is an English saying that the king is always happy, or ‘happy as the king’ — which is not true at all.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/world/asia/thai-king-bhumibol-adulyadej-dies.html