Warren Alan Liburt

HE WANTED TO WRITE-AND HE DID!

Warren Alan Liburt of Jefferson, Maine, left this life on March 26, 2025, to go put out saucers of milk for all the kitties in heaven. To the surprise of everyone who knew him, and no doubt due to the dogged ministrations of Ann Tomkins Liburt, his loving wife of nearly 40 years, Warren had just reached the august age of 95.



Warren was a sensitive and perspicacious soul whose life was marked by perseverance and several monumental reinventions of himself. He was born on March 8, 1930, in Detroit, MI, where the family of his mother, Nettie Ruth ("Ned") Liburt (née Zeman), had in 1927 established a small string of bakeries called Zeman's New York Bakery (which under different ownership remains the longest-standing kosher bakery in Detroit). His father, Joseph Liburt, M.D., was the chief of proctology at Huntington Hospital in Huntington, NY, where Warren and his younger brother Burke grew up in a white Victorian house on East Main Street with Ned, Joe and a beagle named Wendy who was also called Fang.



Warren excelled as a student at Huntington High School and was a star tennis player. He graduated in 1950 from Columbia University, where he was a key player on the varsity tennis team, and from Columbia University Law School in 1953. He then received a direct commission to the Army's Judge Advocate General Corps and served until 1955. Back in civilian life, he served as law assistant to Suffolk County Surrogate's Court Judge Edgar Hazleton, and County Court Judge W. Royden Klein, from 1956-1959. He next opened a private practice in Huntington while participating in Rotary International and with particular enthusiasm in the Huntington Township Young Republican Club, of which he was president in 1962.



It turned out, however, that private practice was not congruent with Warren's finest proclivities, and he subsequently gritted his way through a number of challenging years in New York City trying to find his way to a better life he dreamed of in Maine. That dream ultimately required him to start over in 1981 as the lowest level clerk-typist in the Maine state government system. But Warren's talents and work ethic were hard to miss, and he worked his way up to writing policy for the Division of Support Enforcement and Recovery (DSER), and thence to holding hearings all over the state for the Department of Health and Human Services. His final position was Social Services Program Manager for the DSER, which was fitting because Warren was profoundly sympathetic to mistreated children.



Maine also brought him together with the love of his life Ann, who worked for the state as well, and whom he married in 1985. For 38 years, Warren drove to work in Augusta in a series of Honda Civics that shared a custom license plate composed of Ann's and all their cats' initials. He retired at the age of 89 in 2019. Only then was he finally, finally able to turn his full attention to his lifelong ambition: He wanted to write.



Warren had a gift for analyzing what motivated people to behave as they do. His ability to think through complex matters in a psychologically nuanced way was exceptional. He deployed these writerly skills first in a 2017 biography, "Thomas E. Dewey, et al." that presciently detailed "the use of the criminal process as a weapon in political warfare," as he put it. Writing this tome-whose painstaking footnotes commandeer one-third of its 424 pages, and like the rest of his books are a font of Long Island history-entailed 10 years of Herculean research.

His next six books came relatively quickly, each one more personal than the last, and all informed by his early life on Long Island. They include "The Suffolk County Scandals Investigations: A Reminiscence," which chronicles a turbulent time of political transition involving the Republican Party's 1959 loss of decades of political control in Suffolk County; "Suffolk County Revisited," a two-part work about a 1961 criminal trial in the County Court and the Suffolk County Republican Party's second annual $100-a-plate dinner; "Jonathan and Nathaniel," a meditation on ethics, friendship and the zoning boards that were instrumental in the transformation of Long Island in the 1950s and '60s; and "Anna and Sam," a novella that opens in 1941 with an evocative portrait of Long Island's changing landscape, has a subplot involving the secretly recorded confidential conversations of a Suffolk County Republican Party town leader, and ends with a romance reminiscent of his own with Ann-all in 48 pages!



As he published an astonishing seven books in just seven years (under the pen name William F.F. Young), Warren relished reading certain Samuel Johnson essays over and over (in particular one whose title he refused to divulge). His primary interest was 18th- and 19th-century novelists, among them Charles Dickens (although he was also mysteriously reticent about which novels he favored), Mark Twain, and Jane Austen. He enjoyed historical works that questioned traditional narratives, in particular those of Barbara Tuchman, whose writing he admired. It's hard to say how many times he reread "The Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes." But it was Kenneth Roberts' "I Wanted To Write" that inspired him. Warren also loved listening to Mozart; watching old movies; catering to cats; and sitting on a rock along the coast watching the tide change.

It is odd to think of a world no longer being perceived through Warren's uniquely incisive lens. Throughout his life, he overcame a number of circumstances internal and external, impressing upon his children what determination and redemption look like.

Warren's ashes will be laid to rest after a funeral August 5th at the Maine Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Augusta. Warren will be forever missed. With all our hearts, we wish him Godspeed.



Warren is survived by his wife Ann; daughter Ellen Joy Liburt and son Joseph Charles Liburt, Esq., from his first marriage; brother Burke ("Puncho") Liburt (Frances); niece Nettie Ruth Liburt (Randy Weiner); first cousins Peter Zeman (Beverly Wood), David Zeman (Lori Lackman Zeman), and Ned Zeman (Sarah Thornblade); cousin Paul Glicksberg (Helene Schwartzbach); and Butternut and Arlo the cats.



Preceding Warren to the afterparty were his mother Ned Liburt, father Dr. Joseph Liburt, grandmother Elke Liburt, grandfather Harry Liburt, step-grandmother Pauline Schechter Liburt, and aunt Mildred Seltzer (née Rivka Liburt); uncles Hy Zeman (the late Sylvia), Robert Zeman (the late Maggie), and Miles Zeman (the late Evelyn); and cousins Charles and Dorothy Glicksberg, Stephanie Glicksberg Neuman, and Judith Freed. We trust they are all together now, possibly playing very excitable gin rummy or tennis.