D. Pillsbury, great grandson of mill founder

Donaldson Pillsbury, the great grandson of the founder of the Pillsbury milling empire, died of heart failure Thursday while bicycling in Old Lyme, Conn.

The New York attorney and Sotheby's auction house leader was 67.

Pillsbury, who grew up in Wayzata and who left the Blake School in Hopkins when he was 14 to attend high school in New Hampshire, graduated from Yale Law School in the mid-1960s.

Before joining Sotheby's in 1998, he practiced corporate and financial law, according to a news release from a family spokesman.

He worked on some high profile transactions, such as the Hunt Brothers' attempt to corner the silver market in the early 1980s and the Iranian hostage crisis of 1980 and 1981, representing J.P.Morgan.

In 1869, Pillsbury's great grandfather, Charles, founded Pillsbury Mills.

His father, John S. Pillsbury Jr., was a chief executive of Northwestern National Life Insurance Co. He died in 2005.

His mother Katharine, served on the board of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and was a leader of the predecessor to the United Way. She died in 2006.

He was a resident of New York City and Stamford, Conn.

He is survived by his wife, Marnie, of New York and Stamford; son, Donaldson of San Francisco; daughters Blair Pillsbury Enders of New York City and Wendy Pillsbury Eichmann of Greenwich, Conn.; brothers, John III of Telluride, Colo., and Dr. L. Harrison Pillsbury of Washington; sister Katharine Jose of Chestnut Hill, Mass., and five grandchildren.

Services will be held June 23 in New York.