John Adler

John Adler, 96, passed away June 11, 2024 in Greenwich, CT. The son of Helen and Morton Adler, John was born September 29, 1927 in New York City. He grew up in New Rochelle, NY, where he met the love of his life, Viola, who became his second wife. He graduated in 1949 from Dartmouth College and the Tuck School, Phi Beta Kappa. John began his long and successful business career on the Gimbels training squad and ended there as assistant general manager for operations. He also served for two years in the Army, during which time, in Hawaii, his eldest child Lani was born. Following Gimbels, in 1960 John became a consultant for Booz Allen Hamilton. He left Booz Allen to start his own company, AdTel, which measured the effectiveness of television advertising and tested new products. AdTel was ultimately merged into Booz Allen. In 1977 John started his own mergers and acquisitions firm, which specialized in smaller food and beverage companies, and also handled a few leveraged buy-out transactions. In the early 1970's John acquired a full set of Harper's Weekly Magazines (which were published between 1857 and 1912). He ultimately had all 73,000 pages of them manually indexed, over a period of twelve years, creating the HarpWeek database that is now used in more than 500 colleges, universities and libraries. Harper's Weekly published many Thomas Nast cartoons, and John became a Nast expert and went on to write and publish two books about Nast, "Doomed by Cartoon: How Cartoonist Thomas Nast and The New York Times Brought Down Boss Tweed and His Ring of Thieves" (2008), and "Thomas Nast: America's Most Influential Journalist" (2022). For his work on HarpWeek John was awarded the E-Lin- coln Prize. John ran a small family foundation that fund- ed more than 500 post-doctoral scientists doing research in Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, eye conditions and certain cancers; and in 1991 John established the Adler Foundation Symposium for Alzheimer's Disease research, held annually at the Salk Institute, which has brought together scientists working in different areas of Alzheimer's research to collaborate and share their perspectives. Some have said that at least a quarter of the advances that have been made in Alzheimer's diagnoses and treatment have occurred as a result of the Adler Symposium. John also served as a Salk trustee for 18 years. John was devoted to his family, and relished time with his children and grandchildren. He was divorced from his first wife, and in 1982 married his childhood sweetheart, Vi. They had a happy marriage for 31 years until she died. He is survived by Lani and his son Johnny (Sherri), his grandchildren, Luke (Kathleen), Ryan, Hannah, Josh (Anna) and great- grandchildren, Theo, Cecilia, Oliver and Violet, as well as by his sister, Dotsy Potter, and his companion, Olha. Donations in John's memory can be made to the Salk Institute in La Jolla, CA. https://campaign.salk.edu/ ways-to-give/