Allan B. Ecker

1921 - 2012
Ecker, Allan B., age 90, died on Tuesday, April 24, 2012 in Houston, Texas of natural causes. Allan was a graduate of Columbia Grammar School, Harvard College, and Harvard Law School.
Allan began his newspaper and magazine career as a copy editor on The Chicago Sun (now the Sun-Times). In World War II, as a staff sergeant in the U.S. Army, Allan served as a correspondent for YANK the Army Weekly in France, Germany and Czechoslovakia, and as News Editor and Acting Managing Editor at the New York headquarters of the enlisted men's worldwide magazine.
After the war, Allan was a contributing editor (fulltime writer) of TIME magazine for five years, serving as Education Editor and Press Editor, before leaving to study law under the GI Bill of Rights.
Admitted to the bar in 1953, Allan was an associate and then a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, a venerable and distinguished New York law firm, for 24 years. Later he was Counsel to the Herrick Feinstein law firm. His principal areas of practice were Corporate and Securities law and Real Estate law. Allan was well-regarded in the profession as a mentor of younger lawyers, helping them to bridge the gap between law school and law practice, and teaching them legal draftsmanship.
At Paul, Weiss, Allan was associated with Lloyd K. Garrison in the representation of J. Robert Oppenheimer in the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission administrative proceeding that ultimately determined that Dr. Oppenheimer, who had earlier directed the Manhattan Project creation and manufacture of the atomic bomb, was a "security risk."
Allan was an officer and director for 30 years of a "Fortune 500" public company in the entertainment and publishing business, Warner Communications Inc. and its successor by merger Time Warner Inc. He was a longtime director of David R. Godine Publisher Inc., a Boston book publisher.
In later years, heeding the admonition of the Mitchell Parish/Hoagy Carmichael song "Stardust" to recall "the music of the years gone by," Allan wrote informal memoirs of legal matters in which he been engaged. The Green Bag, a review at George Mason University School of Law, and Legal Studies Forum, a review at West Virginia University College of Law, published the stand-alone chapters of his memoirs.
Allan is survived by his wife Elizabeth Rice Ecker, his daughter Sarah (Ecker) Cooper, his son-in-law Samuel W. Cooper, his granddaughters Hannah and Georgia Cooper, and his sister Laura (Ecker) Ludwig. His sister Shirley (Ecker) Boskey and his son David Rice Ecker predeceased him.
Allan will be remembered at a gathering of friends on Monday, June 18, 2012, from 6 – 9 pm, at The Cosmopolitan Club, 122 E. 66th Street.