Howard Stein

Former chief of the Dreyfus Corporation who as one of the fathers of the mutual fund industry introduced innovations like the first money market fund with no initial fee. Howard Mathew Stein was born in Brooklyn on Oct. 6, 1926, to immigrants from Poland. His family moved around New York, finally settling in an apartment over the Stage Delicatessen on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. He joined Dreyfus and soon became an assistant to Jack J. Dreyfus Jr., the firm’s founder, chief executive and chairman. He became president in 1965, and chairman and chief executive in 1970. In 1994, the Mellon Bank Corporation of Pittsburgh acquired Dreyfus in a stock swap valued at $1.85 billion. Mr. Stein continued as Dreyfus’s chairman and chief executive, joined Mellon’s board and was reported to have made around $90 million personally from the deal. He resigned in 1996. Mr. Stein himself was an early critic of the Vietnam War. In 1968 he took a six-month leave of absence to be chief fund-raiser for Senator Eugene J. McCarthy’s antiwar presidential campaign. He was on President Richard M. Nixon’s so-called enemies list. He worked with John Gardner in planning Common Cause, the citizens’ lobby group. Mr. Stein is survived by his wife, the former Janet Gelder; his daughters, Julia Stokien, Jocelyn Hayes, Jessica Levine, Joanna Stein and Jennifer Seay; and six grandchildren.