Roger Bourke White

He retired from business in 1980, but stayed active helping people in other ways. He linked up with the American Go Association to promote the playing of Go in the United States, serving as Membership Secretary and touring the country to visit local clubs. He also founded The American Go Foundation, which supports the development of American Go by providing schools and libraries with playing materials, offering children scholarships to study the game, subsidizing Go teachers and in many other ways. Go (in Korean paduk or baduk) is a chess-like game which is widely played in the Far East.

He sold out of Glastic in 1968. After that he became Chairman of Lauren Manufacturing Company, New Philadelphia, Ohio, which made extruded rubber products for the auto industry, window sealers for skyscrapers, and other sealers for the Alaskan Pipeline. He founded another major manufacturing business, Pultrusions Corp., Aurora, Ohio which made pultruded fiberglass products. Their products were used for overhead racks on buses, sewage treatment paddles, tent poles and flag poles for bicycles.

Roger's work was part of Cleveland's post-war boom that swelled the city to 7th largest in the nation in the 1950s—just behind Detroit. It also diversified the manufacturing base of the Northeast Ohio area, so that when Ohio's Steel Belt turned into the Rust Belt in the late 70s and early 80s, companies that Roger had founded and worked with cushioned the crunch and contributed to the area's reinvention as a diversified manufacturing area.

In 1946, as part of America's transition from a wartime to a post-war economy, Roger moved from the steel industry to start a brand new industry: the high-tech fiberglass electrical insulator industry. He started Glastic Corporation with Dick Newpher. He became a leader in this field, producing numerous technical conference papers, trade journal articles and a text book on reinforced plastics. Roger's work produced smaller insulators, which reduced the size of electric motors, leading to the proliferation of small motors that now help us every day.

In 1944 he worked on the Manhattan Project which produced the first atomic bomb, and in 1945 he married Anne "Mike" White, and they had two sons, Roger Bourke White Jr. and Jonathan Bourke "Toby" White, and six grandchildren.

Roger Bourke White (1911–2002), a Cleveland businessman, co-founded Glastic Corporation with Richard C. Newpher. Glastic, located in South Euclid, Ohio, was one of the first makers of fiberglass insulators for the electrical industry, and now makes fiber optic cable.

Roger was born in 1911 in Boundbrook, NJ to Joseph and Minnie White. He had two older sisters, Margaret Bourke-White and Ruth. Margaret Bourke-White is generally considered one of the great photojournalists of the 20th century. His father was a non-practicing Jew whose father came from Poland, and his mother, Minnie Bourke, was of Irish Catholic descent. White grew up near Bound Brook, New Jersey (the Joseph and Minnie White House in Middlesex). He described his parents as "Free thinkers who were intensely interested in advancing themselves and humanity through personal achievement," attributing the success of their children in part to this quality. He was not surprised at his sister Margaret's success, saying "[she] was not unfriendly or aloof".