Albert A Strelsin

Alfred A. Strelsin, industrialist, philanthropist and arts patron, died in August 1976 evening of heart failure at his home at 936 Fifth Avenue. He was 78 years old. He was born on Feb. 27, 1898, in Antwerp, and his parents emigrated to Milwaukee soon after the turn of the century. In the mid‐1920's, he began his half‐century in business by forming the Reliance Advertising Company in Chicago. He arranged the merger of several porcelain companies in Germany, and sold the porcelain to the oil companies. With the advent of neon signs, he set up another company, the General Scientific Corporation of Chicago, to increase sharply the production of a crucial electronic component of the neon signs. Later, General Scientific branched into the manufacture of lenses. Mr. Strelsin's other concerns, some of which he set up with partners, included the Park Construction Company, which built the subway and later was merged with the Stiefel Construction Company of New York; Induction Motors; and the Cenco Corporation of Chicago, which broadened under Mr. Strelsin's direction from a concern producing chemistry and other laboratory equipment to the manufacturer of complex industrial engineering devices, including a mechanism to measure amounts of certain substances in petroleum products. Through the 1970's Mr. Strelsin remained board chairman of Cenco, Reliance and Stiefel. Mr. Strelsin also organized a foundation in his name that annually gave tens of thousands of dollars to charities, hospitals and scholarship funds for the delinquent and the underprivileged. In the early 1960's he was also an ardent supporter and active fund‐raiser, with his wife, Dorothy Dennis, the former Broadway singer and dancer, of Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival. His largesse also helped to establish in 1947 the Institute for Muscle Research at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., where Albert Szent‐Gyorgyi, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1937 for discovering Vitamin C, has conducted muscle studies and cancer research since fleeing his native Hungary after the Communists took control there in 1945. In addition to Mrs. Strelsin, he is survived by a sister, Selma Fromkin.