Death of a Classmate - Max Anacker - 15th Co.

Max Anacker passed away at the Stanford Medical Center in Stanford, California on June 5, 2014 after a short hospitalization.

Max was born in Bern, Switzerland, to Hilde and Robert Anacker, on August 19,1931. His parents returned to the USA shortly thereafter. The family moved from New York to Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1932, where Max grew up.  After WWII, Max had the chance to live with his grandfather in Basel and spend one school year (1946/47) in the Gymnasium there, to learn German and French. After returning and spending three years at the University of Chattanooga, Max got an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy, where he graduated in 1954. 

He worked as a chemical engineer for DuPont in Delaware and California, Union Carbide in Texas and West Virginia and finally joined Dow Chemical in California in 1960. In 1964 Max was transferred to the new Dow Europe headquarters in Zurich (later moved to Horgen). In 1969 Max was sent to Stade, Germany, to help build up a new grass-roots chemical complex there, returning to Switzerland in late 1975, after Phase 2 of this project had been completed and handed off to German engineers. Max held various assignments in Dow, including a three-year marketing assignment building up a new oil and gas chemicals business and three years living in Gent, Belgium, as the technical director of a joint venture refinery project with the French company, Total.

Max left Dow in 1982 to set up his own oilfield chemicals company in France.  This startup venture was not successful, so he returned to Switzerland after a year, joining and eventually becoming a shareholder of a small specialty chemicals company there.  This company was sold to a major European chemical company and Max eventually left the successor company in 1991.

From 1991 to 2004 Max worked in a process improvement consultant group with clients in France, Germany and Switzerland, spending the last three years doing management consulting with Chinese companies in Hong Kong, before retirement in 2004.

In 1974 Max and Marianne married. 

He has two brothers and a sister: Andres (Orinda, CA), Stefan (Porrentruy, Switzerland) and Meg Wickesberg (Milwaukee). 

Max has three children by previous marriages (both past wives are deceased): daughter Tina (mother was Patricia Gibson Anacker) and daughter Theresa plus son Steven (mother was Dolores Butcher Anacker).