Robert Edwin Field was born in 1937, raised in the Northwood area of Philadelphia and later its suburb, and relocated with his first wife and children to Lancaster in 1969.
His father, Sylvan Hector Field, with the assistance of his wife Hannah Worobe Field, developed a successful regional credit furniture and department store called Marfield’s with dozens of route salesmen who also made weekly collections on their installment sales.
Sylvan set high academic standards for his three sons and encouraged them to think for themselves and question authority. His mother Hannah, first in her high school class, bestowed a strong social conscience. Brother Martin Worobe Field, who graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, at an early age became a major developer of apartment complexes and later hotels. Brother Joseph Myron Field earned a BA degree at the University of Pennsylvania and law degree at Yale Law School. He founded Entercom Corporation, now named Audacy Corporation, today the second-largest radio chain in the country.
Lena Walters Litschi was a significant influence, a highly competent and loving individual who worked as housekeeper for the Field family for the initial twenty years of Robert’s life. She had co-managed a concrete sidewalk and curb contracting firm with her alcoholic husband and, after their divorce and the Great Depression job scarcity, worked as a housekeeper / maid / cook / nannie for the Field family to support herself and her younger son Gerry who lived with foster parents.
Most of his life Robert was unaware that he struggled from undiagnosed Prosopagnosia (face blindness). He has trouble recognizing acquaintances and even family members, especially when they are in a crowd and outside of their usual context.
He did not speak until he was four years old and after that he rarely shut up. He is more quiet recently knowing that others will read his memoirs.
At the age of eleven, his family moved to the Merion Station on the fashionable Philadelphia Main Line (named for the main spur of the railroad to Pittsburg and points west). He attended the Edmunds School in Philadelphia and then in the eighth grade the Lower Merion School System.
He maintained a ‘C’ average in high school although, on standardized tests and college boards, he ranked at the very top of his class. He was not impressed with Lower Merion High School and felt that many of the teachers were poorly educated and mediocre. When at home he listened to classical music and read classic novels; magazines such as Time, Newsweek, The New Republic, and the Saturday Evening Post; and kept up with current events as reported in the Philadelphia Bulletin and the Sunday Inquirer.
Robert spent his freshman and sophomore years at Oberlin College and later graduated from the University of California – Berkeley, class of ’59, with a major in Economics. Offered an unsolicited two-year master’s fellowship to Cambridge University with a generous stipend for living expenses, he immediately declined and entered the business world with aspiration of a later political or social activism career.
Following a stint in the sale of construction equipment, Robert worked in commercial real estate sales for the Richard Herman firm in Philadelphia and later under Julius Zinman in the Philip Zinman Commercial Real Estate firm in South Jersey, a subsidiary of South Jersey Mortgage Company.
At 27, as Executive Vice President of the Stewall Corporation, a predecessor to Manor Care (no relation to The Manor Companies that acquired its name first from a nearby street), Robert negotiated the construction of nursing homes.
At 29, having earned significant capital through land transactions, his career began as an investor builder of apartment complexes, later residential townhouse communities, and hotels. His various companies adopted The Manor Group as a Service Mark, more recently the apartment division was designated Manor Communities. His initial development in 1967, Manor House Apartments, was with older brother Martin Field, with each owning 47½% and with brother Joseph who received a 5% interest in exchange for law services.
Manor House pioneered the acceptance of African Americans and mixed-race couples in the then rigidly segregated Lancaster city and suburbs.
In the 1970s, Field contributed half the cost for acquiring the current building for Clare House, a women’s shelter, after touring its original location in a row house and noting very dangerous temporary wiring running throughout.
In 1972 while traveling in Italy and visiting the Vatican with wife Terry Vance, his mother Hannah Field, and mother-in-law June Vance, Robert prevented further damage to and safeguarded broken pieces of Michelangelo’s Pieta. His photograph along with the assailant’s reportedly appeared on the front page of the New York Times. He vividly recalls how moved he was while holding the detached hand of the Pieta. (As Field was told afterwards and what few people knew, the statue had been damaged years earlier and the hand hollowed out and wired to the arm.)
Field served as State Finance Chair for Republican Arlen Specter’s successful candidacy for U. S. Senator in 1980. In 2002, during the early presidency of George W. Bush, Field changed his registration from Republican to Democrat.
(Others saw Field as an important future Republican political figure in Pennsylvania and perhaps in the nation. Only late in life has he recognized that many of his lunch invitations with bank heads were predicated on what he had achieved in the Specter campaign and his potential value as a contact with high Republican circles. But for Robert this was only work on behalf of a family friend, nothing more. He and Arlen were never close.)
Field was executive producer for the award winning motion picture “Liquid Sky” (1983), “Diamond Men” (2001), the documentary “Stalin’s Wife” (2005), and the motion picture “Perestroika” (2009). He is also the executive producer of a documentary directed by Dan Cohen on the life and death of federal prosecutor Jonathan Luna, which will soon be released.
In 1990, with its leader Melvin Allen, he co-founded and was the major donor during the first decade of Project Forward Leap, which operated for twenty-five years and each year provided five weeks of educational overnight summer camp on college campuses for about 300 youngsters from disadvantaged backgrounds. In its latter years, Robert’s wife Karen served on its board.
In 1995, Field co-founded with Kevin B. Zeese, Common Sense for Drug Policy. The organization provided facts to counter then prevailing misinformation and flagrant falsehoods that led to misbegotten aspects of the War on Drugs. Drug Policy Facts, long edited by Doug McVay, is a compendium of reliable information taken from governmental and peer reviewed publications. It has served media, academics, officials, students, and the public for a quarter of a century. DrugPolicyFacts.org has had twelve-million visitors and continues to be updated by McVay and widely read.
Along with Sam Rice, MD and Jeff Kegley, and with a helping hand from Senator Arlen Specter, Field co-sponsored, from 2002 to 2005 the state and federally approved Lancaster Prototype Methadone Program, an experiment to permit dispensing Methadone to stable patients at local Ganse Apothocary, as an alternative to receiving the medication in a clinic. Ernest Drucker, PhD, published a paper on the program.
With the valuable facilitation of Assemblyman Mike Sturla and support of the Rendall Administration, Field was the prime mover behind the deregulation of the sale of syringes in Pennsylvania.
Through the private Lancaster Harm Reduction Project Foundation, Field founded and supportssyringe exchanges in Lancaster, York, and Harrisburg, and helps fund an exchange in Reading. Melinda Zipp has been LHRP’s capable director from its outset.
He proposed and funded a CARE Foundation program providing over two hundred and fifty small libraries (approximately the equivalent of 300 books each) in rural schools throughout Afghanistan and Guatemala.
He also served on a committee that added a classroom wing and expanded public areas to Lancaster’s Shaarai Shomayim Synagogue.
In 2001, Field co-founded with son Richard the American House Foundation. This non-profit and the Hungarian Red Cross, its successor in administrating the project, provides milk and bread to supplement the daily diets annually of approximately five thousand young children from impoverished Hungarian households. The foundation also funded half the cost of the acquisition of a former workers’ hotel for sheltering the homeless.
Field provided financial support for The Budapest Beacon and its sister websites in Hungary. He takes great pride in their achievements in unmasking the fascistic regime of Victor Orban.
In 2007, Field devoted much effort to his volunteer role as Project Manager for the tragically aborted renovation and expansion of the Lancaster Public Library at its Duke Street location. State funds earmarked for the library were diverted to complete the Lancaster Convention Center. Sixteen years later, in 2023 the library was re-located to Lancaster Square East as part of the reconstruction of the block.
Field created the web site www.NewsLanc.com, a pioneer in community based reporting for its era. Field had long practiced anonymity for his public services but found it necessary via NewsLanc to personally speak out against the Lancaster Newspapers (now LNP) and the prominent local business magnet Dale High. They both would become the equitable owners of the Marriott Hotel to be developed adjoining and connected to the Convention Center.
Time has proven the then county commissioners’, Field’s, and others’ concerns about the lack of the financial feasibility of the Convention Center to be correct. Despite the convention center’s annual large deficits, all signs indicate that the Marriott Hotel is prospering.
In reaction to the Lancaster Newspapers, Dale High and Fulton Bank, who misled the public concerning the likely prospects of a Convention Center in downtown Lancaster, Field was founder, publisher, editor and occasional writer for NewsLanc.com. The web site for years was viewed by thousands of visitors each week, largely from the Lancaster region, and provided early and superior coverage on many topics. To set an example of democracy in action, for several years Field and a substitute would spend Saturday mornings near the main entryway to the popular downtown Central Market handing out the two-sided flyers with excerpts from the week’s NewsLanc web site.
NewsLanc is no longer active except for an occasional posting of Field’s thoughts and reports on Russia by Slava Tsukerman that are forwarded to the worldwide media.
Field believes the likely most shameful act in the long history of Lancaster was the trumped-up charges by LNP and the then county District Attorney against the courageous and honorable Dick Schellenberger and Molly Henderson. In large part this was due to the two county commissioners’ concerns about the financial stability of the proposed Marriott Hotel / Convention Center project. Unknown to the commissioners and the public, for over a year the Lancaster County District Attorney Donald Totaro, with the support of President Judge Louis Farina who oversaw the Grand Jury, successively brought 23 charges and each charge was rebuffed by the Grand Jury.
The Grand Jury report was made public only after the DA had bluffed the commissioners into pleading guilty to phony minor misdemeanors, with a fine of $100 each. LNP headlined the bogus results over three days and ‘buried’ the ultimate Grand Jury report clearing the commissioners of all charges. It called for reforms.
(2023 - In fairness to LNP’s owners, in recent years and under the guidance of family in-law Robert Krasne, it has returned to the honorable reporting practiced for over a century by the Steinman family. The family recently donated LNP to public interest broadcaster the WITF foundation.)
During the COVID pandemic and resulting school closings, the Field family anonymously donated the cost of a thousand new lap top computers to the School District of Lancaster for the use of students at McCaskey High School. They later quietly contributed a million dollars towards additional school upgrades.
On the initiative of its owners, Manor Communities froze rental rates for new prospects and on renewals for the first year of the Covid Pandemic, at a time when average rental rates soared elsewhere. They chose not to take advantage of a once in a century calamity.
Having fortunately exited the hotel business in 2018 (pre-COVID) while retaining ten of its eleven apartment complexes (contributing the proceeds of the sale of the eleventh to charity), Field is now largely retired from business, although he remains active with the family foundations and past land investments in Hungary and Croatia. He also serves as a ‘sounding board’ to his youngest son Benjamin, a fledgling apartment complex developer.
In 2020, and again with Doug McVay as editor, the Field family’s private Real Reporting Foundation launched World Health Systems Facts (www.WorldHealthSystemsFacts.org), modeled after its highly successful www.DrugPolicyFacts.org. It presents objective excerpts with attributions and links from government publications and peer reviewed journal articles describing health care systems in the United States and, so far, sixteen other economically advanced nations. It currently fills the niche for such comprehensive and trustworthy coverage.
Perhaps he was too obtuse to notice it, but throughout his life he cannot recall an episode of discrimination against him because he was Jewish. Rather it was he who declined as an adult to dine in ethnically restricted clubs, and by doing so offended some who might have been important contacts or even partners. Because of the Holocaust that claimed family members and in respect for his mother’s views, he felt to do so was a sign of respect and remembrance of those who were victims.
Field estimates that over his lifetime he has had the good fortune to have quietly and usually anonymously gifted almost a hundred-million dollars to worthy causes, calculated based on forgone interest and the value of the dollar in 2023, thus a major portion of his wealth.
Nominated by his sister-in-law Marie Felber Field, he and Melvin Allen, LD, are recipients of the Crystal Stair Award for public service from the University of Pennsylvania.
These days, as Robert strolls through Central Park in New York City, he sees toddlers participating in co-ed organized play in part to socialize them. He may have benefited from such early experiences.
Field divides his retirement between his main residence in Lancaster and a part time home on the Upper West Side of New York City. Until 2023, he was often seen either walking or, other than in winter, sitting on a bench in New York’s Central Park, reading and observing those passing by.