Obituary of Elwood Tate Baker

Elwood Tate Baker Devoted Husband and Father, World War II Veteran Elwood Tate Baker, a resident of Sunrise Assisted Living in Basking Ridge since 2006, died peacefully on March 17 at Morristown Memorial Hospital. He was 88. Known as Tate, he was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on July 28, 1925, the only child of Elwood W. Baker and Winifred (Tate) Baker. He was also the grandson of Elwood Thomas Baker and nephew of Hollywood producer and screenwriter C. Graham Baker, who together invented the card game gin rummy. Tate was a summa cum laude graduate of the Grace Church School in New York City, which he attended from elementary through secondary school as a scholarship student and member of the Grace Episcopal Church Boys Choir. Growing up in Brooklyn and later in Queens, he spent countless hours on Staten Island with his aunt, Gertrude Tate, and his “Aunty Al,” the photographer Alice Austen, at her home “Clear Comfort.” At age 9, he met his future wife while serving as a dance partner at his Aunt Gertrude’s school of dance and deportment. Then age 7, Leonie Vosburgh was less than impressed but changed her mind when they were reintroduced in their late teens. They were married in 1948. Tate entered Haverford College in July 1942 in the accelerated wartime curriculum and enlisted in the U.S. Navy in May 1943 at age 17. He continued his education in the Navy’s V-12 program at Dartmouth College, Northwestern and Harvard universities and the U.S. Naval Reserve Pre-Midshipman’s School in Asbury Park. He served as a Coding Officer and Communication Watch Officer on the USS Saint Paul in the South Pacific and Shanghai, China, and was aboard the USS Missouri on Sept. 2, 1945, in Tokyo Bay on a routine communications delivery when representatives of the Emperor of Japan signed the Instrument of Surrender. He was graduated from Haverford in 1947 and received his MBA from Harvard Business School in 1949. In a long and varied career as a marketing research expert, he taught business as a full-time professor at St. Lawrence University and later worked as a marketing analyst for General Electric, Booz Allen Hamilton and the U.S. Department of Commerce, where for 18 years in the office of International Trade Adjustment, he provided research and guidance to help small and midsize American companies obtain loans to better compete in a global economy. Married for 58 years, Tate and Leonie lived in Canton, Schenectady and Port Washington, N.Y.; Caracas, Venezuela (for three years in the late 1950s); Genoa, Italy; and for 34 years in Bethesda, Md., until her death in 2006. He was predeceased by his daughter, Elizabeth Tate Baker, in 1998 and is survived by his daughter, Alice Baker Lynch, her husband Cornelius Thomas Lynch and cherished granddaughter Ramey Elizabeth Lynch, all of Basking Ridge, and by his beloved first cousin and lifelong best friend, Mary Jane Macartney, and her family, of Northport, Long Island, N.Y. Donations in Tate’s memory can be made to the Alice Austen House Museum in Staten Island, N.Y.