Born to a Jewish family in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1928, Ronald P. Stanton fled Nazi Germany with his mother in 1937 to live in New York. He served in the United States Army after obtaining a B.A from the City College of New York in 1950 and began working with the International Ore and Fertilizer Corporation. He rose to the position of Vice President of the fertiliser trading division before beginning his own trading and distribution company, which he called Transammonia, Inc. Married twice, he had three children and famously gave away vast sums of his personal fortune. In 2008, he donated $25 million to the Lincoln Center, where he has a walkway named in his honour. In 2006, he made a $100 million gift to Yeshiva University in New York City. He was also a well-known art collector, counting works by Picasso, Renoir and Matisse among his large collection. While his net worth at the time of his death in September 2016 is difficult to ascertain, in lieu of flowers, his relatives asked for a donation to be made to the Ronald P. Stanton Clinical Cancer Program at the New York Presbyterian Hospital. His eldest son, Oliver Stanton, continues to serve as Senior Vice President of the company and has continued his father’s legacy of philanthropy, particularly in New York.
