Jack Nash, 79, a Founder Of Odyssey Partners and Sun
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Jack Nash, who fled Nazi Germany as a child and went on to co-found one of the seminal hedge funds, Odyssey Partners, died yesterday at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan. He was 79.
He was also a founder of The New York Sun.
RELATED: Jack Nash.
Employed at Oppenheimer & Co., the pioneering mutual fund management and investment banking firm from the early 1950s, he became a partner and served as the fund’s president between 1974 and 1979, when he was named chairman.
He founded Odyssey with Leon Levy in 1982. Levy and Nash had specialized in leveraged buyouts at Oppenheimer, where they built a relatively small player into a major institutional broker and then took control.
Asked how he chose targets for Oppenheimer, Nash said in 1978, “The stock market has become inefficient in judging the value of medium-sized and smaller companies. Very simply, we’re buying values.”
The company also raised money for innovative businesses such as John Z. DeLorean’s gull-winged sports car company.
Nash and Levy sold Oppenheimer to British interests in 1982 for $163 million.
They founded Odyssey with a reported $50 million of their own cash plus backing from other investors, including George Soros. Among Odyssey’s specialties was finding value in bankrupt companies, something Levy and Nash had pursued since the 1950s, when they began buying up bankrupt railroads. Levy was the idea man and Nash the tough if informal negotiator.
“Call me Jack,” he would tell visitors. “Mr. Nash is my father.”
Odyssey disbanded in 1997.
Nash also served as vice chairman of the American Stock Exchange in the late 1970s.
Born April 10, 1929, in Germany, Mr. Nash emigrated to America with his family before World War II. He graduated from City College in 1953.
In 1957, he married Helen Englander, who survives him, as do his children, Joshua and Pamela, and six grandchildren.
A funeral will be held today at 1 p.m. at the main synagogue of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, at 125 E. 85th St. Interment will follow at Beth El Cemetery on Forest Avenue in Paramus, N.J.
