Thursday, September 1, 2011

Ted Drescher, the guy

A couple of years ago, an alert member of my Income Tax class prowled around on the internet and turned up some interesting information about Ted Drescher, the person.  And of course, that got me going, and I unearthed some other details about him.  They really have no significance from a substantive perspective, but some people just love the human stories behind tax cases, and if you're one of those, you might enjoy what we found.

It turns out that Ted was the grandson of Johann Jacob Bausch, one of the founders of (and the brains behind) Bausch & Lomb.  Ted's mom was Bausch's daughter, Anna Julia (~1869-1959); she married Willibald Drescher (1861-1937), who like Anna's dad was an immigrant from Germany.  (That may be Willie in the left foreground of this photo.)  Ted (named after his grandfather on his father's side) was Anna and Willie's only son; they also had two or three daughters.  When J.J. Bausch died in 1926, he left grandson Ted (then in his early 30's) 100 shares of the company in his will.

Here's an interesting story about Ted's childhood home in Brighton, New York, which is adjacent to Rochester.

At one point, the company got in trouble in a criminal antitrust case, and Ted was one of the officers hit with a civil suit over the same matter years later.  But the civil case was dismissed.

Ted was also a bit (scroll down) of an inventor.

Interestingly from our perspective, Ted never did live to collect on that annuity of his.  He died of a heart attack in 1953, at age 58, meaning that his beneficiaries (probably his widow, Rolena (d. 1986), and two daughters, Anna (d. 1993) and Marjorie (1926-2009)) would have gotten the death benefit specified in the policy.  Ted's mother was the last surviving child of J.J. Bausch; she died in 1959 at age 90.

Ted's buried with at least 15 other members of the Drescher clan in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester.  That's the same cemetery in which lie the remains of Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass.

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