Timothy S. O’Neil, a senior vice president with Herring Bank Wealth Management, died on May 6 at his home in Austin, Tex. He was 67. The cause of death was a cardiac event, according to the Travis County Medical Examiner’s Office.

O’Neil was a passionately supportive alumnus of Princeton University, where he played rugby. Over many decades and in several states, he both played and coached rugby while counseling Princeton applicants. He was also a long-time volunteer in hippotherapy programs and conservation efforts. Prior to Austin, he lived in Amarillo, Tex.; Naples and West Palm Beach, Fla., and New York City.

Along with Herring Bank, he worked for financial firms that included Greenspan O’Neil Associates, US Trust, Naples Money Management and Citizens National Bank.

Born Aug. 4, 1954 in Highland Park, Ill., O’Neil graduated from Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, NY in 1972. He graduated from Princeton with a history degree in 1976. He was a member of the Tower Club and its social chairman during his senior year.

After graduation, O’Neil played for the New York Athletic Club’s Winged Foot Rugby Club and later for the Hammerhead Rugby Club in Naples. He volunteered as a coach for local clubs in Naples, Amarillo and Austin. 

In 2021, the Princeton Class of ’76 awarded him a Methuselah Award for having played in all but one of the annual rugby matches between current players and alumni since his graduation -- he’d been on crutches that year. He never missed a class reunion. In 2020, when the official event was canceled, he organized an alumni “P-rade” in Amarillo; in 2021, when reunions were held virtually, he was one of a small group that drove to Princeton to hold their own unauthorized celebration. He was an active alumni interviewer for Princeton admissions for many years.

While living in Florida, O’Neil brought his daughter Annabelle to the Naples Therapeutic Riding Center to do community service. He became deeply involved in the Naples Equestrian Challenge, a hippotherapy program working with individuals with a wide range of disabilities, eventually joining its board. Annabelle remembers him sweating through as many as four shirts in a day as he worked with youngsters in the Florida summer heat. “He also got kicked a lot,” she said.

“Tim was always very sensitive to people in need of help,’’ his brother Brian said. “He always stood up for them.”

He volunteered in Nature Conservancy Inc. programs on Marco Island; while he lived in West Palm Beach, he organized beach cleanups and programs to protect baby turtles there.

A seven-day-a-week master of The New York Times crossword puzzle, O’Neil read widely in history and science fiction. His oldest daughter, Glenaan, had recently asked him why he was reading a 1910 book on American railroads. It emerged that he was buying first editions of the books contained in A Wall Street Curmudgeon’s Stock Market Library, an online collection of rare and notable volumes on the subject. But his greatest loves were his grandchildren, Henry and Bea, with whom he spent time every day since moving to Austin in 2021.

In addition to Glenaan and Annabelle and Henry and Bea, O’Neil is survived by two other children, Rory and Merrilee; his son-in-law Matthew O’Neil; his mother, Nancy O’Neil; and five siblings: Brian, Sarah, Kevin, John and Annie O’Neil.