Walter Mintz, who died yesterday at his home in Manhattan, was a hedgefund pioneer who retired early and spent the rest of his life supporting education and educational research through the Manhattan Institute, where he sat on the board, and by serving as chairman of the board of Reed College.

Mintz was one of the early operators of hedge funds, investment vehicles that would become wildly popular in recent decades. Usually the funds are short-lived, but Mintz’s Cumberland Associates, founded in 1970, is still thriving. Boasting an average net return on capital of 18% between its founding and 2003, Cumberland is one of the most successful hedge funds. It is almost unique in having survived multiple changes in leadership.

After allowing younger partners to buy him out in 1982 – although Mintz retained an office and a limited partnership at Cumberland until his death – he concentrated on educational improvement. At Reed, where he already sat on the board, Mintz took charge of the school’s investments and shepherded its portfolio through divestment of its South African investments.

At the Manhattan Institute, Mintz concentrated on educational reform, particularly issues related to charter schools. Lawrence Mone, president of the Manhattan Institute, called Mintz “an intellectual architect of the institute.”

Mintz was born in Vienna to an eminent Jewish family, with relatives who were art historians, psychologists, and economists. His father was a lawyer, his mother an economist, and his maternal grandfather served as envoy to Mussolini. When Nazi forces marched into Austria in March 1938, the family fled via Switzerland; Mintz, who was 9 at the time, retained memories of watching soldiers force Jews to scrub the streets. His grandfather, the envoy, remained behind, then hiked over the Alps and was admitted to Italy by personal order of Il Duce. (The story is told in exquisite detail in “The Vienna Paradox,” a recent memoir by Mintz’s sister, Marjorie Perloff.)

The family reconstituted itself in the Bronx, where young Walter, schooled in European notions of New World geography, professed disappointment at finding that there were no Indians living in Riverdale. While his parents struggled to make a living in America – his mother ended up on the faculty at Columbia University, while his father went back to school and eventually became a top accountant – Mintz attended DeWitt Clinton High School, only to be rejected by Harvard University and Swarthmore College despite graduating near the top of his class. On the advice of a family friend, he attended Reed College, located in far-off Oregon. The education he received there, steeped in classics and with a major in religion, was to be a major influence on Mintz for the rest of his life.

Returning to New York after graduation, Mintz studied economics at Columbia, but instead of writing a dissertation went to work as a writer and editor at Barron’s. In 1956, Mintz took a job on Wall Street as a securities analyst for Shearson, Hammill & Company, one of the largest stockbrokers in the nation. He developed a reputation for careful research into stocks, particularly in the automobile and heavy machinery sectors. He was named director of research in 1962. “He was a good analyst,” a broker who worked with Mintz at Shearson, Estelle Strongin, said. “His skills in stocks translated well into politics and life. Philanthropic work, too.”

In 1965, Shearson ran a full-page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal featuring Mintz gazing fixedly at the reader through horn-rimmed spectacles, hands clasped, over the words “Professional Skeptic.” Mintz was fond of the ad, and allowed Reed to use it as part of a fundraising campaign years later.

In 1970, Mintz and a Shearson colleague, Donald Cecil, founded Cumberland Associates. The fund invested mainly in the kinds of equities the two were familiar with, mid-sized American firms, with an eye on the long term. Already, Mintz was planning on retiring early.

Mintz married in 1971, and also became a trustee at Reed. He later became vice chairman and then, in 1998, was named chairman of the board.

Mintz in 1990 joined the board of trustees at the Manhattan Institute, where Roger Hertog was chairman at the time. “His greatness lay in a deep commitment to the world of ideas and uncompromising integrity, a wide-ranging philanthropic vision, a record of enviable success as a money manager, and a rare capacity for friendship,” Mr. Hertog said. “Simply put, he was a mensch.”

Mintz and his wife, Sandy, traveled widely and spent weekends at their home in Connecticut, where he was an avid tennis player. Mintz was also an avid reader of nonfiction, favoring books on education and military history. In recent months, he told his wife he had been dreaming of the French and Indian War, and credited his DeWitt Clinton education for having drummed it firmly into his memory.

In 2003, the Manhattan Institute gave Mintz its annual Alexander Hamilton award, and Mintz used the occasion to list his favorite Institute projects, including charter schools, housing code reform, municipal bus line privatization, and eliminating junk science in courtrooms.

“In the past several years, there have appeared a number of newspaper and magazine articles about the growing influence of so-called conservative think tanks, including the Manhattan Institute,” Mintz said. “The really curious thing about these articles is that most of them never even consider the possibility that we are as successful and influential as we are because we have gotten the facts right a lot more often than our critics have.”

For Mintz, it was the facts that mattered, whether in finance or politics.

Walter Mintz

Born February 23, 1929, at Vienna, Austria; died November 16 at his home in Manhattan of the effects of carcinoid cancer; survived by his wife, Sandy, and his sister, Marjorie Perloff.