Arthur Edwin Witte

According to Liz Stokes, when Arthur was ~13 he rode his bike in the rain and caught Rheumatic Fever and developed a heart murmur.

He started at Carlton College, then transferred to University of Illinois and ultimately transferred and graduated from Northwestern. Aunt Jill's theory is that he partied a lot in college.

During WWII, Arthur tried enlisting and was turned down b/c of the heart murmur. Not being one to take no for an answer, he enrolled in officer training school and got through the training. When it was time to be deployed, he had a physical and once again failed the physical. Since he was already in the army at that point, they didn't know what to do with him. So they put him in a hospital for six weeks while they figured it out. It was during that time he was told he would never live past 30.

And, according to Aunt Jill and Liz, this "death sentence" profoundly affected his approach to life. This started during college.

Persuaded Grandma Dee to elope from the garden behind the library at Northwestern, while their parents were at graduation ceremony. Caught a train to NY. 1941?

Merrill Lynch? Broker?

Then worked for father as CPA.

From "The Lester Witte Report 1979": Arthur passed his CPA exam in 1946. "Having worked for another national firm for a year to gain some "outside" experience, he now joined Lester Witte & Company. As he gained experience working with Les on the administrative problems of running an accounting practice, Art assumed more and more of the day-to-day burden his father had always shouldered alone."

Les retired in 1962. "During the next fifteen years, the office grew rapidly to become a national firm by developing and refining the Controllership-By-The-Hour concept so that client companies benefited enormously from the system."

Then grew the firm.

Owned horses. Raced. Owned a "stable" of horses named "JADE Stables." JADE = Jill Arthur Dee Elizabeth.

Arthur was never sure of his family's national origins. Arthur was somewhat estranged from his family; he didn't like his brothers in New York and was somewhat cut off from family history. At some point he sat Aunt Jill down and said, "here's where I think we come from..." He thinks Witte is an Americanization of "Witcowski," - an Ellis Island switcharoo. Arthur's parents are American. But the grandparents may be from Russia/Poland on his father's side, and Spain on his mother's side.