Gordon Lavenson Furth
1921-June 22, 2006
Palo Alto, California

Gordon Lavenson Furth died at his home in Palo Alto on June 22. He was 85.

Born in Berkeley, his family moved to a ranch in Yolo County when he was a child. He graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1942, where he was the valedictorian and editor of the Daily Cal.

In 1943 he married Nina Wynne, who had been his managing editor at the Daily Cal. He then attended Harvard Business School on a joint M.B.A./Officer Candidate School program for the U.S. Army, but was soon commissioned into the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps midway through the program.

Following the war, he completed his master's program and went to work as a manager for the accounting firm Arthur Anderson. In 1956, he moved with his family to Lima, Peru, to work as an executive for Marcona Corporation, a San Francisco-based mining and shipping company. He returned to the Bay Area with his family but continued to travel extensively, particularly to Japan, Germany, New Zealand and Peru.

After retiring in 1985, he and his family moved again, this time to Orange County, where he was a stalwart supporter of the then-tiny Orange County Democratic Party, convinced his values had been abandoned by the Republican Party some years earlier.

In 2005, as a widower, he moved back to Northern California, dividing his time between the homes of his daughters and the family?s vacation home in Inverness. He was a member of the Board of Visitors of the Harvard Divinity School and served as director and/or treasurer for a number of nonprofit organizations, including International House at Berkeley.

He is preceded in death by his wife, Nina, and his brother, Alan C. Furth. He is survived by his daughter Wynne Furth and her husband, Donald Brenneis, of Palo Alto; his daughter Amy Furth of Claremont and her husband, Dennis MacDonald, of San Francisco; his sister, Carol Sontag, and her husband, Frederick Sontag, of Claremont; and three grandchildren.

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