Madison in the Sixties – In Memoriam, part 2 – business leaders
Madison native Thomas E. Brittingham Jr., son of the great lumberman/philanthropist, and a founding trustee of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, suffers a fatal heart attack at age sixty- one while driving near his home in Wilmington, Delaware, on April 16, 1960. A member of the campus Ku Klux Klan interfraternity in the early 1920s, Brittingham became president of the Research Foundation in 1955 and oversaw its successful investment strategy.
Two leading businessmen take their own lives in 1961 one due to failure, the other to success.
Frederick J. Meyer, fifty- one, founder and president of Red Dot Foods, owned plants in eight cities and thirty- five thousand retail outlets in twelve Midwestern states. On May 5, he merges his company with H. W. Lay & Co. Although continues as president of Red Dot and become vice president and a director of the Lay company, Meyer is despondent over the loss of owners