Albert Sanders, an engineer and industrialist who had a house in East Hampton for 40 years, died at home in Manhattan on June 7 at the age of 103 “after enjoying robust health for more than a century, a few months of decline, and a few final days of worsening health,” his family wrote.
“In his last weeks, as for all of his later years, he was surrounded by his extended family, including his wife, Margot Wellington, his son, James Sanders, his daughter, Avis Sanders, his stepson, John Wellington, and several of their children.”
Mr. Sanders and his wife built a house on Baiting Hollow Road in Georgica in 1984, and “well into his 90s, he spent each year shuttling between his apartment on the Upper East Side” and his house in East Hampton, “with forays a few times a year to an apartment in the Sixth Arrondissement in Paris that he shared with Ms. Wellington.”
Born in Harlem on May 25, 1920, to Benjamin Sokalner and the former Frances Adelson, he was raised in Inwood — where he attended elementary school across the street from the last working farm on the island of Manhattan — and in Laurelton, Queens. He entered Columbia College in the fall of 1937 “and took Columbia’s legendary humanities class — the original Great Books course, replicated later at universities around the country — the first year it was ever given,” his family wrote. He remained friends with its professor, Mark Van Doren, for decades.
After shifting to Columbia’s engineering school, he graduated in 1941 with a degree in industrial engineering and went to work as a civilian in 1942 in the Pentagon, which was still under construction at the time. He then enlisted in the Army Air Corps and attended officer candidate school at Yale University. “He became an officer in an engineering squadron, but was never sent overseas,” his family said.
For 35 years, Mr. Sanders was the president and C.E.O. of the Allen-Stevens Corporation, a die-casting company he ran with his two younger brothers that had plants in Woodside, Queens, and New Jersey. At its peak, the company employed over 300 people.
In the mid-1960s, at a time when computers were typically reserved for much larger companies, “he became an innovator in integrating early computers into his midsized company’s business,” his family said. He was featured by IBM in a publication devoted to Allen-Stevens’s “pioneering use of digital technology for controlling manufacturing as well as for payroll and billing.”
“Long fascinated by cities and architecture, Mr. Sanders found a perfect match in his second wife, Ms. Wellington, an urbanist and the former executive director of the Municipal Art Society, who in the 1970s was instrumental in mobilizing the necessary resources (including the participation of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis) to preserve the landmark status of Grand Central Terminal,” his family wrote. “Their shared love of urbanism and culture was burnished by decades of travel to cities and historic sites around the world, and by the close and lively company of distinguished architects, designers, engineers, preservationists, and civic activists from New York, Paris, and around the world.”
Mr. Sanders was known for his “incisive intelligence, quick wit, and astonishing intellectual capaciousness — which seemed to embrace every human enterprise and activity under the sun,” according to his family. He was a devoted reader until the end, including of The East Hampton Star, which his family said “he read religiously and to which he wrote innumerable letters across the decades on a wide range of topics.”
His “extraordinary physical and mental constitution allowed him to enjoy life in comfort and with enormous intellectual stimulation throughout his 90s and well past the century mark, by which time, in the words of the New Yorker writer Adam Green, ‘he seemed, if not eternally youthful, eternal. An institution. A bridge to another era,’ ” his family said.
He is survived by his wife of 43 years, Ms. Wellington, his son, James Sanders of New York City, his daughter, Avis Sanders of Washington, D.C., his stepson, John Wellington of New York City, their spouses, and his grandchildren, Ben Wellington, Jackson Sanders, and Elodie Wellington. His first wife, Edith Sanders, died in 1988.
A memorial service was held on Sunday at Riverside Memorial Chapel in Manhattan. Mr. Sanders was buried on Tuesday at Cedar Lawn Cemetery in East Hampton.
