Roger Bourke White

Roger Bourke White (1911–2002), a Cleveland businessman, co-founded Glastic Corporation with Richard C. "Dick" Newpher. Glastic, located in South Euclid, Ohio, was one of the first makers of fiberglass insulators for the electrical industry, and now makes fiber optic cable.

Roger's work was part of Cleveland's post-war boom that swelled the city to 7th largest in the nation in the 1950s—just behind Detroit. It also diversified the manufacturing base of the Northeast Ohio area, so that when Ohio's Steel Belt turned into the Rust Belt in the late 70s and early 80s, companies that Roger had founded and worked with cushioned the crunch and contributed to the area's reinvention as a diversified manufacturing area.

Roger was born in 1911 in Boundbrook, NJ to Joseph and Minnie White. He had two older sisters, Margaret Bourke-White and Ruth. Margaret Bourke-White is generally considered one of the great photojournalists of the 20th century.

Roger graduated from MIT in 1934.

After graduation he worked first for Union Carbide in New York City. Union Carbide asked him to move to Cleveland Ohio to sell welding and cutting products to the steel industry there. It was in Cleveland that he met and became a business partner with James T. Lewis at Lewis Welding.

During his early years in Cleveland he became part of the Gold Coasters, a small men's group. While there, he and his friend Dick Newpher built a sailing kayak from a kit. They didn't like it. It was flimsy, so they worked it over, redesigned it. They took their new design to the Mentor Harbor Yachting Club, Mentor, Ohio and there sailed rings around the regular sailboats.

Roger also loved camping and flying airplanes. He would take days-long trips into the wild woodlands around the Great Lakes. He flew planes as small as Piper Cubs and as large as twin-engined Piper Apaches.

In 1944 he worked on the Manhattan Project which produced the first atomic bomb, and in 1945 he married Anne "Mike" White, and they had two sons, Roger Bourke White Jr. and Jonathan Bourke "Toby" White, and six grandchildren.

...
Wikipedia