Remembering a scientist who nurtured Sarasota's arts

If you've ever attended a performance of the orchestra, ballet, theater or a chamber music concert in Sarasota, no doubt you've heard the name Ernie Kretzmer.

The longtime Sarasota resident, who died Aug. 24 at the age of 99, was a generous donor to Sarasota's arts organizations, both in his own name and in honor of his late second wife, Alisa Kretzmer.

An open house at Kretzmer's Lido Key home on Aug. 27-28 hosted by his family drew a wide array of luminaries from Sarasota's arts and charitable organizations.

Daniel Jordan, concert master for Sarasota Orchestra, stopped by on the afternoon of Aug. 28, having just arrived from New Mexico, where he was performing with the Santa Fe Opera.

Jordan recalled Kretzmer's love of music and his generosity, noting that the first violin that he played upon joining the Sarasota Orchestra in 1998 was purchased by the retired scientist and inventor. At the time, the orchestra was known as the Florida West Coast Symphony. 

Also on hand to pay her respects to Kretzmer's son, Peter Kretzmer, was Marcy Miller, executive director of Artist Series Concerts, one of the many cultural organizations that Ernie Kretzmer supported. 

Miller's relationship with Kretzmer was relatively new since she only joined Artist Series Concerts in 2019, after spending six years at the William King Museum of Art in Virginia. 

Like the others paying tribute to Kretzmer on Lido Key, Miller remembered the philanthropist as a man of great joy and generosity.

According to a eulogy by Peter Kretzmer, his father was born Dec. 24, 1924 in Germany and was fortunate to escape the Nazi persecution with the help of his sister Laurie. The Kretzmer family first moved to the Isle of Man in England.

In his eulogy, Peter Kretzmer noted his father spoke English "like a royal" and sprinkled his conversation with such Shakespearean aphorisms as "To thine own self be true," wisdom that he passed along to his son and daughter, Wendy. (The siblings were not named after the characters in the children's book "Peter Pan," Peter told guests.)

From a young age, Ernie Kretzmer had a love of music. He also liked to take things like radios apart and tinker with them. This mechanical aptitude served him well in his education, first at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, where he attended college, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned his Ph.D.

Charting his own course

In an interview, Peter Kretzmer said his father discovered Sarasota while on a business trip to Miami during his 35-year career at Bell Laboratories, the research arm of AT&T.

"Initially, my dad wasn't big on Florida because he said everyone retired there. He wasn't a follower," he said. "But then he discovered Sarasota after seeing a reference in Time magazine to the town as a cultural pearl."

Ernie Kretzmer was first a snowbird, buying a time-share property and later a condo on Benjamin Franklin Drive on Lido Key. In 1989, he moved to Sarasota full time after retiring. He built a home on Polk Drive with his second wife, Alisa, whom he married in 1983.

Kretzmer's first wife, Suzanne, died in 1981 at age 54 after several bouts of cancer. Her family members perished in Hitler's concentration camps and she was never able to recover from the trauma, her son said. 

In a fortuitous twist of fate, Peter Kretzmer was later able to buy the condo his father first owned after it came up for sale many years later, just when Peter was moving to Sarasota in 2018. "It really feels like home to me," he says.

When Peter Kretzmer was growing up, he remembered his father being frugal and calculating tips with exactitude. He credits his late stepmother with encouraging his father to expand from being a music aficionado to becoming a full-fledged patron of the arts.

Recent arrivals to Sarasota will know that Ernie Kretzmer's later life was enriched by his wife's caretaker, Dorathea Sandland, a registered nurse who became his companion after Alisa's death. 

"Dorathea watched my dad slowly age while still enjoying life here and attending events galore," Peter Kretzmer told mourners at his father's funeral. "They became a pair on the social scene, and Dorathea helped my dad through heart surgery, walking difficulties necessitating a new hip and the other inconveniences of aging. Through it all, Dad never complained, always intent on enjoying and taking advantage of the cultural life around him while he could."

It would take more than a page in a newspaper to enumerate all the important financial contributions Kretzmer made to Sarasota's arts and charitable organizations. He once told a reporter that he supported more than 60 different groups. His favorites were Sarasota Orchestra, Sarasota Opera, Sarasota Ballet and Florida Studio Theatre. In 2015, he donated $500,000 to FST to build housing for its artists.