Deceased September 13, 2012
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In Memory
Bill passed away Sept. 13, 2012. His hometown was Scarsdale, N.Y. At Amherst he joined Delta Tau Delta. He—like a lot of us—joined the Navy V-7 program, accelerated and then graduated Jan. 31, 1943.
The navy informed him that he would not be activated soon, so he got a job with Mutual Broadcasting in New York. The navy then ordered him to midshipman’s school at Columbia University the same day he started work at Mutual. He was commissioned in June 1943 and spent the rest of the war on LST 509 in the South Pacific.
In June 1945 he joined the first post-war class at Harvard Business School. After graduation he was a salesman for Continental Can Co. followed by a position with the American Association of Advertising Agencies. In May 1946 he married Ruth Braden.
In 1953, with his daughter JoAnne in kindergarten and Jeffrey as a preschooler, he and Ruth moved to Birmingham, Mich., where he began a very successful 30-year career with Ford Motor Co.
Ruth was a busy housewife, PTA, church and League of Women Voters, and she successfully ran for the Birmingham City commission. She was elected three successive times, which included a term as mayor. In 1974 she was elected to the Michigan House of Representatives, where she served 10 years.
In 1983 Bill retired from Ford and worked on golf, their condo association and being an elected trustee of Southfield Township. While working at Ford, they vacationed in Vero Beach, Fla. In 1991 they sold their Michigan home and moved to Vero Beach. He continued playing golf and was involved with their homeowner’s association, the Environmental Learning Center and town government. A nearby neighbor was Harry Keefe ’43.
Monty Hankin ’43