Philanthropist Paul C.T. Loo, who co-founded what later became Hawai'i Pacific University and recently retired as the head of Morgan Stanley's Honolulu office, died of a heart attack Sunday while on a family trip to Edinburgh, Scotland, Morgan Stanley officials said yesterday.

Loo was 75 when he retired in April after 47 years with Morgan Stanley. He would have turned 76 on July 14.

He had been on a post-retirement trip with his wife, the former Violet Shaw of Singapore; daughter Pamela Mayer Loo; son Rodney, who works in Morgan Stanley's San Francisco office; and five grandchildren, said Gwen Pacarro, who took over as complex manager of the Honolulu Morgan Stanley office when Loo retired.

"This is the big thing he had envisioned — taking the family to Europe," Pacarro said. "They were about to go on a barge trip down the Thames, I believe. But now the grandkids are going without him."

The family will bring Loo's ashes back to Honolulu for a service that has yet to be scheduled, Pacarro said.

"Morgan Stanley and the community at large will really miss Paul Loo," Pacarro said. "He's been an institution. You don't run across someone like Paul Loo every day. He will be a legacy."

In 1965, Loo, Eureka Forbes, Elizabeth W. Kellerman and the Rev. Edmond Walker were the primary movers behind the establishment of Hawai'i Pacific College, which later became HPU. Loo was the lone survivor of the group.

He helped found Hawai'i Pacific College six years after statehood because "he believed that in this new emerging state, there ought to be a private institution for learning," said HPU President Chatt Wright.

Last year, Loo donated $50,000 to the HPU student finance club — "a typical Paul Loo thing," Wright said. "He believed students needed firsthand knowledge."

Loo also founded HPU's annual Paul C.T. Loo Distinguished Alumni Banquet and in 2001 received HPU's Fellow of the Pacific Award, HPU's highest honor.

At HPU's trustee meetings, Loo often would deliver "great rhetorical monologues about excellence and how we should strive to be better and how the endeavors we were engaged in are noble ones," Wright said. "He stood for greatness and he recognized quality, whether it was in wine or food or art or theater. He admired creative, entrepreneurial people, and he admired creative artists."

Last year, the Loos made a "significant" donation to the Hawai'i Loa campus' plans for a performing arts center. In the meantime, HPU renamed its existing Windward campus theater the Paul and Vi Loo Theatre.

When he died, Loo was a member of HPU's board of trustees and Chaminade University's board of regents.

At Chaminade regents meetings, "He felt that the future of the country lies in our youth," said Chaminade board chairman R.J. "Zap" Zlatoper. "To some people, it's a trite statement. To Paul, it was a genuine belief. When you met him, you knew he was genuine and had great personal integrity. If you went to him for advice, you knew you would get a solid answer and not a politically expedient one. He wanted to do what was right for the long term, not the right thing to do for the moment to solve a problem."

Chaminade recently remodeled its administration building to create the Paul and Vi Loo Student Center so non-Hawai'i students wouldn't find themselves alone like Loo was in Pennsylvania.

"He knew that it can be very lonely, and he knew how much the student center had meant to him," said Sue Wesselkamper, Chaminade's president. "So he wanted to take that on as a project.

"He had a very demanding job, but he loved to hear about our students," Wesselkamper said. "He would always tell me that we should have more student presentations at board meetings. He felt they were young people with dreams and hopes. He was successful in life and felt that people should give back to the community. That was a personal goal he had."

Loo graduated from Punahou School in 1948, then received a B.A. with distinction from Dartmouth College and an MBA from the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania. He served in the Army as an artillery officer in Europe, then returned to Honolulu as deputy chief underwriter for the Federal Housing Administration.

He also was chairman of the state Ethics Commission and president of the former Honolulu Stock Exchange.

Loo also was a member of the Hawaii Business Roundtable, the Rotary Club of Metropolitan Honolulu, the Clarence Ching Foundation and Kukui Gardens Housing Development. He also was a director of C. Brewer Ltd. and an associate trustee of the University of Pennsylvania.

Reach Dan Nakaso at dnakaso@honoluluadvertiser.com.