A gentle, quiet pillar of the
community, Ted Altier, died June 21 after a long and brave struggle with
illness.
Ted epitomized a special kind of Rochester civic
leadership: fiercely committed, and fiercely low profile. He was active in
numerous organizations — board member of the Rochester Philharmonic, WXXI,
the Finger Lakes Health Systems Agency, the YMCA, RIT, the Visiting Nurse
Service, and many others — but that kind of list tells little about him.
Plenty of people could match his résumé and leave no legacy. Ted, says his wife
Betty, accepted positions on a board “because he believed in the organization
and wanted to support it.”
And he seemed to be interested in everything. His
education included studying mechanical engineering at the University of
Rochester, a bachelor’s degree at West Point, back to the U of R in the 1950s
for Russian and financial management, Italian and French at Nazareth and Fisher
in the 1990s. “He was always learning,” says Betty, “always very open to new
ideas.”
While Ted, like many veterans, talked little about it, he
served in the Infantry in World War II, was captured, and spent time in a
German prison camp. On a long list of his honors, the Purple Heart and Bronze
Star are there, alongside the Rochester Chamber of Commerce’s Civic Medal and
the Brighton Rotary’s Citizen of the Year award.
The West Point experience, says Betty, was formative: “He
was very devoted to and very much shaped by West Point. The West Point motto
— duty, honor, country — meant more to him than the military. These are the
principles that guided him in his business, in the community, and with his
family.”
He became deeply involved in community work, says Betty,
“because his business had done well in the community, and he wanted to give
something back.”
It was through his business — Altier Shoes, which Ted
and his brother Richard ran after their father’s death — that many
Rochesterians knew Ted. While they may not have known him personally, they knew
him through the unique character of the Altiers’ stores. Free first shoes for
babies, a record of children’s shoe sizes kept up to date: Sure, it was good
marketing (“He was a good businessman,” says Betty), but these were
hometown-store gestures that felt personal and genuine.
For years, Altier’s resisted the growing retail trend and
refused to open on Sunday: a losing battle, says Betty. And that wasn’t the
only losing battle Ted embraced. In the 1970s, he served on a committee that
proposed a two-tier form of metropolitan government for Monroe County. Later,
he was president of the Urbanarium, an organization founded to help community
leaders and residents find a way to discuss, rationally, such crucial issues as
land use and city-county cooperation.
Nationally, unethical business dealings continue to make
the news. Locally, some of the community’s most crucial problems continue to be
ignored. And many business leaders long ago washed their hands of community
involvement.
Ted Altier has left a legacy and an example that this
community badly needs.
— Mary Anna Towler
This article appears in Jun 26 – Jul 2, 2002.
