Background
William R. Orthwein, Junior. was born February 12, 1917. His father, William R. Orthwein, was a lawyer who competed in water polo at the 1904 Summer Olympics, and his mother, Nina Kent Baldwin, was a schoolteacher.
Businessman chairman philanthropist president
William R. Orthwein, Junior. was born February 12, 1917. His father, William R. Orthwein, was a lawyer who competed in water polo at the 1904 Summer Olympics, and his mother, Nina Kent Baldwin, was a schoolteacher.
Orthwein was educated at the Rossman School and the Saint Louis Country Day School. He graduated from Yale University, where he received a degree in business in 1938.
He had two brothers, Robert Baldwin Orthwein and David Kent Orthwein. Orthwein started his career as a salesman for the General American Life Insurance, now part of Metropolitan Life . In 1942, he joined McDonnell Douglas, now Boeing.
He served as the President and Chairman of one of its subsidiaries, the McDonnell Automation Company, from 1970 1982.
He served its Board of Directors until his death on June 1, 2011. Additionally, Orthwein served on the Boards of Directors of the Mercantile Bancorporation and the Microdata Corporation.
Orthwein was a generous philanthropist in Saint Orthwein served on the Boards of Trustees of the Boy Scouts of America, the Missouri Historical Society, the United Fund (now the United Way), and Saint Luke"s Hospital. He also endowed the Orthwein chair at the Washington University School of Law.
Through the foundation, Orthwein donated United States$2.5 million to the Yale School of Medicine to support scholarship in Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences in 2007.
In 2015, posthumously, the foundation donated United States$1 million to "The Muny", an outdoors amphitheater in Saint Orthwein died of pneumonia on June 1, 2011 in Clayton, Missouri. He was buried at the Bellefontaine Cemetery in Saint