Robert Zoellner

Robert Emil Zoellner (April 26, 1932 – December 23, 2014) was an American investor and stamp collector who was the second person to have formed a complete collection of United States postage stamps, following Benjamin K. Miller, who had assembled a complete collection pre-1925.

Zoellner was born on April 26, 1932, in Irvington, New Jersey to parents Emil John Zoellner and Anna Elizabeth Morton. Raised in what is now known as Elmwood Park, New Jersey (then East Paterson), Zoellner graduated from Lodi High School in 1950. He attended Lehigh University, where he graduated in 1954 with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and engineering physics and played on the school's hockey team. He was a member of Lehigh's Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps program and served for two years in the United States Air Force after graduating from college.

Following his military service, Zoellner went into the investment field, establishing the firm of E.J. Roberts in 1958 before joining Edwards & Hanly, a firm that named him in 1964 as its managing partner. Together with his wife Victoria, he formed the investment firm Alpine Associates in 1976, which focuses on merger arbitrage, bankruptcy and other investment strategies. By the time of his death, the firm based in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey had $1.7 billion in assets under management and claimed never to have had a losing year since its establishment.

Zoellner had been a resident of Cresskill, New Jersey, where he donated funds to build tennis courts and a baseball field. He moved to nearby Alpine in the 1980s, where he was the borough's largest individual property owner, loaned heavy equipment to the borough's Department of Public Works and donated funds to the Alpine Public School District. Alpine mayor Paul Tomasko described Zoellner as "one of our foremost residents".

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