Robert Tisch

Preston Robert "Bob" Tisch (April 29, 1926 – November 15, 2005) was a Jewish American businessman who was the chairman and -- along with his brother Laurence Tisch -- was part owner of the Loews Corporation. Tisch was born in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn in 1926. On August 16, 1986, he was appointed Postmaster General of the United States Postal Service, serving until February 1988.

In 1991, Tisch bought a half-stake in the New York Giants football team from Wellington Mara's nephew Tim, who had inherited the share from his father and Wellington's brother Jack upon his death and who was suffering from Hodgkin's disease which would eventually claim his life. Tisch held the share until he died on November 15, 2005 from brain cancer; Tisch's death followed Mara's three weeks earlier from lymphoma. His share of the Giants passed to his son Steve, who co-owns the team with Mara's son John.

Tisch received a BA degree in economics from the University of Michigan in 1948, and his wife Joan Tisch and his daughter also received degrees at the university. While in college Tisch was a member of Sigma Alpha Mu, a Jewish fraternity.

Personal life
In 1948, he married Joan Hyman. They had three children:
 * Steven is a producer who lives in Beverly Hills. He is the only Tisch child to leave the New York area and serves as the family’s point man in their shared ownership of the New York Giants.
 * Jonathan is the public face of the hotel division of Loews Corporation. In 1988, he married Laura Steinberg, the daughter of financier and insurance executive Saul Steinberg, at the Central Synagogue in Manhattan. They later divorced. Jonathon is also an active Democratic Party fund-raiser.
 * Laurie sits on the board of the Whitney and the Children's Museum of Manhattan and is chairwoman of the Center for Arts Education, a nonprofit group that works to improve arts education in the public schools. She is divorced from Donald Sussman, the founder of Paloma Partners, a hedge fund in Greenwich, Connecticut with $1.5B under management.

Philanthropy
Tisch made substantial donations to his alma maters, leading to these institutions naming a building and a school after him. Tisch Hall, on the University of Michigan central campus, houses that university's history department. New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and NYU Medical Center's Tisch Hospital are named after Laurence A. and Preston Robert Tisch. NYU's Preston Robert Tisch Center for Hospitality, Tourism, and Sports Management was founded in 1995 and expanded in 1999 to meet the needs of a growing student population. In 1997, the Central Park Zoo opened the Tisch Children's Zoo. Given two months to live by his New York doctors, Tisch lived for 14 more months under care at Duke University's Medical Center. In recognition of their efforts, the Tisch family donated $10 million to the Duke Brain Tumor Center which was renamed the Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center in October, 2005. The Tisch Building in New York City which is the headquarters of the Gay Men's Health Crisis is named for him and his wife (who is on the GMHC Board of Directors) after they donated $3.5 million for it in 1997.