Harvard Business School Alumni

An American Story

Joan Levy and Ted Levitt on August 1, 1948. The couple married six months after their first date.

Photo courtesy Joan Levitt

Boris Levitt was a Russian shoemaker who lived under Stalin before he was captured by the German army and brought to that country. He married Rachel Grunen-baum in 1935. As Hitler’s popularity grew, Boris emigrated to the United States with his wife and four children, settling in Dayton, Ohio. Times were tight and jobs few and far between. Boris heard about work at a shoe factory, but when he arrived, he found a long line and a security guard who told him that all the positions had been filled. Undeterred, Boris had his two sons, Albert and Ted, stage a fight at the street corner. When the security guard left his post to break it up, Boris slipped into the building and talked his way into a job.

That sort of resourcefulness and drive seems to have been a family trait. Although he didn’t arrive in the United States until age 10, Ted Levitt didn’t look back, rarely discussing what must have been a difficult childhood for a Jewish boy during Hitler’s ascendancy. After serving in World War II, where he fought in the Battle of the Bulge, he completed high school via correspondence course and enrolled at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

“Antioch was a hotbed of students who did it their way,” says HBS Dean Jay Light, a native Ohioan whose first HBS class was taught by Levitt. “It was a very creative, independent sort of kid who went there, and I imagine Ted Levitt was one of them.”

At Antioch, Levitt met Joan Levy, who was attracted to his straightforward manner. “I was working on a paper in study hall, and he suddenly appeared and asked if I wanted to go out Saturday night,” she recalls. When Levitt left for a work-study job in New Jersey at an economic research firm, the couple correspon-ded, getting to know each other through letters. They married on August 1, 1948, six months after their first date.

Levitt enrolled in the Ph.D. program in economics at Ohio State, earning his doctorate in just two years. Joan Levitt, an English major, helped edit his dissertation, “World War II Manpower Mobilization and Utilization in a Local Labor Market.” “His sentences sometimes ran on and on in the Germanic way, so I would tighten them up a bit,” she remembers. In a tough job market, the couple felt lucky when Ted got an offer from the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, eighty miles north of Fargo. At the time, Joan was pregnant with the first of the couple’s five children. “My mother was sure they wouldn’t have any doctors out there,” she says with a laugh. The Levitts spent four years in North Dakota before moving east in 1959.

Thirty years after arriving at Soldiers Field, with eight books, dozens of articles, and hundreds of students transformed, Levitt assessed his accomplishments with the usual dry-eyed perspective. “What I’ve achieved is I’ve made myself effective in some way,” he told Marketing Business in 1989. “I’ve kept myself intellectually curious, alive, and productive and made myself interesting to myself.”