Robert Jackman, who spent nearly 40 years at the former Bear, Stearns & Co., died early Friday after a more than 10-year battle with lung cancer. He was 65.
While at the firm, Mr. Jackman was the senior managing director in charge of municipal bond trading, short-term trading and retail trading. He retired from the firm in early 2006.
Mr. Jackman, who was tapped to serve on the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board this fall, founded the Brooke Jackman Foundation in memory of his daughter, Brooke, who died in the World Trade Center during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The foundation creates and supports literacy programs for disadvantaged children and their families in the New York City area.
A Vietnam veteran, Mr. Jackman also was past president of the Municipal Bond Club of New York and a member of the Shawnee Indian Bond Club, an informal group of market participants from the Northeast who meet annually.
John Young 2d, managing director at Samuel A. Ramirez & Co. who worked with Mr. Jackman at Bear Stearns, said he will be greatly missed. “He developed deep and strong relationships with everyone, from investors to issuers to traders to salesmen, and was universally admired,” said Young, who is also vice chairman of the MSRB.
"He was a great man who brought honor to his family, who lived by and taught everyone he worked with that the bottom line was not the money we make but the people we serve," said Joseph Fichera, chief executive officer of the advisory firm Saber Partners LLC, who also worked with Jackman at Bear Stearns. "All of us who knew him will miss a beacon of honesty and integrity in our profession."
Thomas Doe, chief executive officer of Municipal Market Advisers who got to know Mr. Jackman through the Shawnee club, said he was among the warmest people has he met.
“Underneath an initial gruff, New York exterior, he was one of the kindest men in the industry,” Doe said.
In an interview with The Bond Buyer just before his retirement from Bear Stearns, Mr. Jackman said he was the sixth person on the muni desk when he was hired as an assistant trader in August 1968 and over the years watched the department grow to over 150 people.
“It’s been a long time,” Mr. Jackman said in the interview. “I wasn’t trading from day one. I was a glorified gofer in the beginning. I was back from Vietnam and I was learning the business. In those days everybody did everything, underwriting, sales, trading. I found my way to trading.”
Jackman is survived by his wife of 41 years, Barbara; a son, Ross, who is a partner at First New York Securities LLC, and runs the firm’s municipals group; a daughter, Erin, who is executive director of the Brooke Jackman Foundation; a daughter-in-law, Iris; two grandaughters, Blake and Elle; a sister, Sandra Jackman Hoffman; sister-in-law and brother-in-law Gayle and Chuck Steinberg; and many nieces, nephews and other family members, according to a release from the family.
Funeral services will be held Sunday at Gutterman’s Funeral Home in Woodbury, N.Y., at 11 a.m., to be followed by burial at Wellwood Cemetery in Farmingdale.
The family will be sitting shiva, a week-long period of mourning, on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, from 2 to 4 p.m. and from 7 to 9 p.m., at Robert and Barbara Jackman’s home at 986 West Shore Road, Mill Neck, Oyster Bay, N.Y.; and on Wednesday and Thursday, during the same times, at Ross and Iris Jackman’s home, at 160 Foxhunt Crescent, Oyster Bay Cove, Syosset, N.Y.
The family requests any donations be made to the Brooke Jackman Foundation, P.O. Box 354, Mill Neck, N.Y. 11765 or through its website:
