Horace Mann - Spring 2017 - 59

Memorials

Robert M. Tauber, DDS '54,
Dentist and Professor of Dentistry
With sadness we report the death of Dr. Robert Tauber '54 on March 17,
2016. Dr. Tauber went to Columbia College and to the College of Dental
Medicine at Columbia University. He served as a dentist and a Captain
in the Army. Dr. Tauber practiced dental medicine in Pleasantville, N.Y.,
was a Fellow of the N.Y. Academy of Dentistry and was on the Board of
Governors, Ninth District Dental Society. He also taught oral diagnosis
at Columbia's College of Dental Medicine. He is survived by his wife
Dorothy, daughters Sharon Mullholland and Robin Plonsker and by his
brother Frederic J. Tauber '67.

Richard Weltz '54, Spectrum Head and
American Thinker Writer
Horace Mann School sadly records the death of Richard Weltz '54 on
May 13, 2016. Weltz was editor of The Record and was on the boards of
the Mannikin and Manuscript. He graduated from Princeton University
in 1958, and served as a member of the Horace Man School Alumni
Council and on the HM Board of Trustees. Weltz' stepson James Bloom
'81 wrote a moving memorial that is excerpted only briefly here: "My
stepfather, Dick Weltz was a captain of a dying industry who spent most
of his career refusing to abandon his ship and boldly trying to plug
ever larger holes in its hull instead. This ship was 'the shop'-one of the
largest typography firms in New York City ... Weltz Ad set much of the
type for the top agencies in the City during the Golden Age of American
Advertising. Dick worked in a couple of such agencies himself during
the late 1950s after graduating from Princeton but when his father
asked him to join the family business he felt duty bound to do so, in addition to being drawn by the craftsmanship involved in typesetting in those
days ... His decision to go into typography was an ironic one as Richard
was one of a handful of people in his industry who already knew by 1960
that the writing was on the wall-to make the kind of bad pun he always
savored-for typography as a highly skilled trade and a high profit
industry. He was well aware that hot metal typesetting ... was doomed
to be replaced within a decade or so by photo-typesetting based on
electronic and photographic technology. He simply chose to ignore this
out of passion for his craft."
In 1972 Weltz' company merged with King, a printing company
founded in the late 19th century. Wrote Bloom: "It was the only typographer in America that could set type in dozens of foreign alphabets
... My stepfather understood that if new, cheap technology was laying
waste to his industry in English, it would only be a matter of time
... until the same happened with other languages. Nevertheless,
his passion for the family trade kept him in it. By the time I started
to work for Richard to earn pocket money during vacations from
Horace Mann in the late '70s the huge Linotype machines and the old
Type Union men who ran them were already long gone, replaced by
electronic keyboards about the size of a typical electric piano today
but with more keys ... Meanwhile, on Dick Weltz's capacious executive desk there now sat a personal computer with dot-matrix printer,
which I plainly remember his telling me would, in another decade or
two, be improved to the point that this new technology would do all
the work now being carried out by his business ... On June 12, 1988,
the year he turned 50, The New York Times ran a profile on him
and his business. Now called Spectrum ... it was a couple of humble
offices in which a handful of multilingual, highly-educated recent

migrants, painstakingly trained by Richard to use high-end desktop
publishing packages, sat at Apple MACs and printed out the finished
product on fancy laser printers called Linotronics ... Richard told the
reporter that he was expecting to bill a million dollars by the end of
the year, but added 'off the record' that, in spite of this, companies
like his wouldn't exist in 10 years' time because it would be too easy
to do the job yourself. Yet still, he wouldn't give up. When he retired
in 2003, he was running a translation service attached to a traditional, non-web graphic design studio that had bought his business
... Within a couple of years both had closed down." Bloom related that
his stepfather had become increasingly politically conservative over
the years and, in his retirement "settled into a busy life of ... honing
his increasingly radical Republicanism on a stream of right wing
talk radio shows, the better to write pieces for conservative blogs
like The American Thinker ... " Along with Bloom, Richard Weltz is
survived by his wife Jane, daughter Lisa Waldman, a grandchild and
two step-grandchildren.

Ira R. Buchler, Ph.D. '55, Professor of
Anthropology and Influential Author
Horace Mann School was saddened by the death of Prof. Ira R. Buchler
'55 on October 31, 2016, peacefully in his sleep at Emerson Point, Iowa
City, Iowa. A Professor of Cultural Anthropology in the Department of
Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin for 28 years, he was
the widely published author and editor of influential books and articles
in the field, including Applications of Game Theory in the Behavioral
Sciences (with H. Nutini, 1969), the first major attempt to apply game
theory, linear programming, and graph theory to anthropological
data. Prof. Buchler received his B.A. from NYU in 1961 and his Ph.D.
in Social Anthropology and Ethnolinguistics from the University of
Pittsburgh in 1964. He then went to the College de France, Laboratoire
d'anthropologie sociale, National Institute of Mental Health as a
post-doctoral fellow in 1971-1972, and worked as a Research Fellow
for the famous French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. Prof.
Buchler's teaching career spanned 30 years, from working as an
Instructor at the University of Pittsburgh in 1963 to teaching at the
University of Texas from the late 1960s and becoming a full professor there from 1975 to 1993. He was awarded numerous grants and
research fellowships, including from the National Endowment for the
Humanities and the National Science Foundation, at such institutions
as the Law-Medicine Institute, Boston University, Bridgewater State
Hospital for the Criminally Insane and the Advanced Research Projects
Agency, Office of Naval Research. He published 34 articles and essays
in prominent anthropology journals, and, along with his Games Theory
book the alumnus published: Kinship and Social Organization: An
Introduction to Theory and Method (with H. Selby, 1968); A Formal
Study of Myth (with H. Selby, 1970); The Rainbow Serpent, a Chromatic
Piece (with K. Maddock, 1976); Games with Numbers (with R. Kozelka,
1980); and Estudios de Parentesco (1983). He also wrote Odd Mann
Out: A Memoir of Madness and Imprisonment (2002). Prof. Buchler
moved to Iowa City in 2002 to live near family, including his cousin
Ina Loewenberg who wrote: "Ira had the best memories of Horace
Mann. He was more devoted to the school than to his undergraduate
... or graduate institutions. We often heard stories of his long commute, the formal dress of the times, and later, about some classmates
he followed in the newsletters." Please contact Ina Loewenberg at
inaloewenberg@uiowa.edu.
Horace Mann Magazine Spring 2017

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