Raleigh philanthropist and art patron Assad Meymandi has died
Raleigh psychiatrist Assad Meymandi, a patron of the arts in North Carolina who believed engaging with music and visual creations were their own powerful kind of healing therapy, died Friday, May 10, after an illness.
He was 89.
Meymandi often told the story of starting life as the youngest of 9 children in Persia — now Iran — of a physician father who also was a poet and philosopher. His mother loved the arts, he said, and he learned from both his parents that those who can afford to give money to enterprises that lift humanity are obliged to do so.
In an interview with The News & Observer for a 2004 story about his involvement in the effort to turn the Dix property into a park, Meymandi said he was a precocious boy in a family that valued knowledge. He learned to read and write early, and could understand several languages including Farsi, French and Arabic as a young child.
Meymandi attended a French Jesuit school in Tehran and went to the Sorbonne in Paris, where he studied at various art museums. When he decided he wanted to become a medical doctor, he researched the best places in the world to pursue the field and determined America was where he needed to be.
Meymandi said he arrived in the U.S. in 1955 and headed off to Phoenix where he first attended a community college and then went to Arizona State to study biochemistry.
“I learned English by memorizing the dictionary,” he said in 2004.
From there he went to George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where he received his medical degree in 1962.
Meymandi spent three years in a residency and lived on campus at the former Dorothea Dix Hospital in Raleigh, from 1963 to 1966, before moving to Fayetteville and going into private practice. He eventually became the psychiatric director of the Cumberland County Mental Health Center, served as president of the Cumberland County Medical Society, was on the leadership team of Cape Fear Valley Medical Center, wrote a guest column for the paper and had a daily, three-minute radio show which he talked about medical issues.
In one of those columns, he offered his summary of all religious teaching, which he espoused as a sound philosophy and the essence of love for the rest of his life: Don’t abuse yourself, don’t abuse others, and don’t let others abuse you.
Committed to supporting the arts
While in Fayetteville, Meymandi said, he invested in several startup banks and helped found a television station, all of which helped him launch a fortune he would later enjoy using to support favorite causes.
Meymandi moved in 1993 with his wife, Emily, to Raleigh. He said he loved the city for what it was and what it could be.
Meymandi especially wanted to nurture classical music and visual arts in the capital city, and when Raleigh announced in 1998 it wanted to expand Memorial Auditorium with a permanent home for the N.C. Symphony, Meymandi promised to donate $2 million toward the cost if the building could bear the Meymandi name.
“It was to honor my mother,” Meymandi said.
The acoustics of the concert hall are so finely crafted that Meymandi said he could feel the vibration of the violinists’ strings from his private balcony box, in which he hosted many dozens of friends through the years.
While he had given up his radio career, Meymandi continued to hold court in letters to The News & Observer, where he chastised politicians, praised good work and offered advice on healthful living. He took a more academic approach in a weekly blog, “Dr. A. Meymandi’s Monday Musings.”
He paused the blog in 2022 after 12 years.
His beloved Emily died in 2016 of complications from Alzheimer’s disease.
Meymandi is survived by a daughter and three sons.
A funeral will be scheduled at Christ Episcopal Church in downtown Raleigh, where Meymandi was a member.
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