May 6, 1923-December 28, 2019

 Vance Warren Weaver, long time resident of New York City and founder of the typesetting company Vance Weaver Composition, died at his home December 28, 2019 at the age of 96. In the 1960s, at the forefront of the printing industry, he was considered a pioneer.

     Born in Brooklyn, NY, to Albert Burnley Weaver, III and Emma A. Lincoln, he spent his boyhood years in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Asheville, North Carolina. At 12 he returned to Brooklyn to live with his grandmother, fulfilling the wish of his late grandfather to attend Brooklyn Poly Prep Country Day School. He entered Columbia University at 17. There, he was a co-founder of what became WKCR, partnering with his lifelong friend Leonard Koppett (Kopeliovich) to produce the show “Hello Mars” and to report live sports from Baker field. 

    In 1941, with a draft call from Uncle Sam hovering (and to alleviate off-campus living costs), Vance worked part-time for six months with the Merganthaler Company assembling gun sights for 155mm howitzers and 240mm long rifles, with supervision over more than twenty workers.

    He married Lisbet Stumpp, a native of Stockholm and a student at Barnard College, in 1942.  The following year he was drafted into the US Army, spending more than two years in the European Theater of Operations, including in the Battle of the Bulge, spending the winter in the Hürtgen Forest on the German-Belgian border. Discharged in 1945, he returned to Columbia and received his degree. For a time he found employment at Columbia Press. By 1951 he and Lisbet had two children, a son Michael and a daughter Karen. 

      In 1950 he established his technical cold-type typesetting company on New York’s Upper West Side, composing college textbooks and scientific journals, one of the first to use computers in prepress.  Vance taught himself coding and database management before there was such a thing, becoming involved with the group that designed HTML and producing the indices of the papers of all the presidents up to Richard Nixon.  In the “50s, “60s and “70s the company produced translations of Soviet Physics journals.

     Following a divorce from his first wife, in 1952 he married Elisabeth Adile Hakim, whose family had moved to the U.S. from Belgium at the end of the war. His second marriage also produced two children, a son, William and a daughter Nicole.

     In 1960, he bought land and built a house on Lake Candlewood at the end of Saw Mill River Road. In the 1980s he downsized his company and moved it to Sherman, where by then he and his wife had a weekend-summer house, on Cedar Lane. There he worked with his daughter Nicole creating large databases for library publishers and crossword puzzle books for Simon and Schuster. Vance had written throughout his life, sometimes publishing in scientific journals. It was during this period that he started consistently writing essays and opinion pieces for both the Sherman Sentinel under Jeannie Robbins, and the Town Tribune under the editorship of Ellen Burnett. Rep. Gary Ackerman read his columns into the Congressional Record on a regular basis.  He also wrote a memoir about his time in the war.

       The tragedy of Toni’s and Vance’s lives was the death of their daughter Nicole, nephew Robin Clark and close friend Melissa Watrous Penn in an automobile accident on the Pacific Coast Highway. Vance slowly closed down his company, continued to write for the Sentinel and started a blog that had readers as far away as South Africa and China; its last entry in August 22, 2019.

        A fall that Spring precipitated a decline in his health and after a Christmas surrounded by his wife, son, grandsons and great grandsons, Vance Weaver, in the words of his son Will, “finally ran out of steam on December 28th.”

        He is survived by his wife Elisabeth, known to all as Toni, a sister Ann Weaver Clark Dodge of Asheville NC, his son Michael Ericson of Stockholm, daughter Karen Ericson Greenberg and her husband Ron of Bar Harbor, his son Will Weaver and his wife Margaret, his granddaughter Alma Ericson, his grandsons Nisse Greenberg, Will Weaver, Jr. and Hamilton Clay Weaver, and great grandsons Colin and Riley Weaver.

 

This obituary was written by his sister, Ann Clark Dodge and uploaded by his son Will.