From Dayton copy boy to Harvard Business Review editor

Ted Levitt

Your entire family escapes from almost certain torture and death. And then you suddenly return as a conquering soldier and speak to the woman who now occupies the beloved house you once called home.

That was the real-life adventure that Theodore (Ted) Levitt described to me in the newsroom of the old Dayton Morning Journal newspaper. Sometime prior to World War II, Ted came to the paper as a copy boy. He came in every day after classes at Parker Cooperative High School, where he was in its work-study program.

He impressed us as being exceptionally intelligent. He spoke good English but with an obvious German accent. He did his work very quietly and effectively, and seldom spoke unless responding to others.

I was one of two Jews on the news reporting staff at the time and Ted and I developed a warm relationship. I was interested in his background, since he and his family had left Hitler’s Germany while escape was still possible.

He revealed to me that his father, Boris, had brought his wife and four children from a small town near Frankfurt, Germany, as Nazism was taking hold there in 1935.

Boris, a cobbler here as well as in Germany, found employment in local repair shops and eventually was employed by Cappel Luggage, a large leather goods store in downtown Dayton.

When the United States entered World War II, Ted was drafted into the Army before he could complete high school.

When the war finally ended, I returned to the Journal after being away for more than three and a half years. Ted had returned also.

Appearing more mature and self-assured, he told me he had obtained high school accreditation via the G.E.D. process and was attending Antioch College. He was also working part-time in the newspaper’s sports department.

We began to compare war experiences. My memory tells me Ted was in the infantry and had been sent to Germany because he knew German well. Then Ted added, “We even went to Wollmerz, the town where we used to live.”

He explained that he was a sergeant and was with his squad in a truck when they entered Wollmerz as the Allies were advancing into a falling Germany.

“We approached our family’s former house from the rear and stopped and looked around,” he said. “The house appeared to be occupied and in reasonable, good condition.

“A woman came out, nervously approached us and asked in poor English what we wanted there. I told her in German that this house used to be my home. At that, she became very fearful and ran back into the house. Then we moved on and out of that neighborhood.”

I asked how he felt about that experience. He thought for a few minutes with a somber expression and then shook his head sadly, saying nothing further.

Only later did I learn how much that house meant to him. It had really belonged to his grandfather (his mother’s father), Abraham Gruenebaum, who had served as shochet (ritual slaughterer) for the Wollmerz community.

Ted’s father had constructed his cobbler’s shop on that same property. Ted and his siblings had been born there as was their mother. The grandfather, too, may have been born in that family home.

The local Jewish cemetery has many generations of the grandfather’s family buried there, according to Dorothy Engelhardt, Ted’s sister living here in the Dayton area. She said her grandfather died before the Holocaust took full effect.

At Antioch College, Ted met his wife, the former Joan Levy, and received the first of his college degrees. In 1951, he achieved his doctorate in economics from The Ohio State University and began teaching at the University of North Dakota.

He began his distinguished career at Harvard Business School in 1959. He was the author or co-author of eight books, mainly dealing with marketing. He retired from Harvard in 1990.

Dr. Levitt died on June 28 at the age of 81 in Belmont, Mass., following a long illness. He had extensive obituary write-ups in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, as well as the Dayton Daily News.

They acclaimed him as a retired Harvard professor and editor of the prestigious Harvard Business Review. The Times stressed that he coined the word “globalization” in connection with his emphasis on marketing.

His style of lecturing at Harvard was highly animated. He walked back and forth rapidly, throwing chalk to emphasize points.

His sister, Dorothy, recalls going to Antioch College to hear him as a visiting alumnus, giving one of his marketing lectures.

She was impressed and surprised by her animated brother who would suddenly halt in his pacing, point to a student and demand, “What do you think?”

That was quite different from the quiet, polite young man I knew in my old newspaper office.