Samuel Glazer

Samuel Glazer, a co-founder of the company that gave the world Mr. Coffee, one of the first and most popular automatic drip coffee makers to appear on American kitchen counters, died on March 12 in Cleveland. He was 89. The cause was complications of leukemia, his wife, Jeanne, said. Before Mr. Glazer and Vincent Marotta came up with the idea, the two men had been partners in a series of businesses for more than 20 years, particularly real estate development, when they bought a coffee delivery company serving the Cleveland area in the late 1960s. They hired two former Westinghouse engineers, Edmund Abel and Erwin Schulze, to create a compact, stylish version of the commercial dispenser. Their effort led to Mr. Coffee. Mr. Coffee caught on quickly. The parent company, North American Systems, sold more than a million units within three years. A large reason was the baseball legend Joe DiMaggio. He was the public face of the company for 14 years, promoting Mr. Coffee in print advertisements and television commercials. Mr. Glazer and Mr. Marotta sold the company to a securities firm in an $82 million leveraged buyout in 1987, a year after it had sales of $120 million. Mr. Coffee is now a brand of the Sunbeam Corporation. Samuel Lewis Glazer was born in Cleveland on Feb. 24, 1923. Mr. Glazer’s wife, the former Jeanne Berger, and his son Robert are his only immediate survivors.