Mark Rodman, attorney, antitrust expert in beer industry
Mark H. Rodman was an attorney and consultant for beer industry wholesalers for 36 years, many of them small, family-built businesses. He was a legend in the industry, known for his encyclopedic knowledge, his toughness, and his idealism. ''Dad was a champion for the little people," his daughter Tori of Los Angeles said.
''Every wholesaler -- or distributor -- in the country knew and respected Mark Rodman," Simon Bergson, president of the Manhattan Beer Distributor, said yesterday. ''He was brilliant. He was professorial in the way that he would educate his clients. I got my degree from Mark Rodman."
Mr. Rodman, a trial lawyer and antitrust law expert who spent most of his career as an attorney and consultant for the beer industry, died March 2 at Salem Hospital of complications following abdominal surgery. He was 65 and lived in Swampscott
Mr. Rodman was responsible for the drafting of key legislation that protected beer wholesalers and dealers from the big manufacturers and importers who provided them with the beer. ''Mark was passionate in advocating for his clients, passionate in defending the beer industry and the role of the distributor in that industry," Andre R. Jaglom, partner in the New York law firm of Tannenbaum Helpern Syracuse & Hirschtritt, said in his eulogy.
In 1982, Bergson said, Mr. Rodman coauthored the New York Returnable Beverage Container Law, the so-called ''bottle bill," for the state. ''The wholesalers, or distributors, didn't want it, but the Legislature did. The bill imposed hardship for the distributors, but it had to be dealt with," Bergson said. In drafting the law, he said, Mr. Rodman ''eliminated a lot of the negative experiences" inherent in the Massachusetts bottle bill passed earlier.
In 1996, Bergson said, Mr. Rodman coauthored the New York State Franchise Law. ''It's one of the strongest in the country," he said. ''It gives financial protection to the distributors by preventing the brewers or importers from taking away your franchise, much as the government might take someone's property by eminent domain."
In 2005, Mr. Rodman won the ''Sammy Award" from the New York Beer Wholesalers for lifetime achievement.
Besides following his late father, Bernard Rodman, into the law, Mr. Rodman distantly shared a connection to the beer industry with him. During Prohibition, the elder Rodman ran a ''malt shop" in Lynn where he sold malt syrup, the basic ingredient in making beer. At the same time, he was taking night courses in law in Boston.
Mr. Rodman was born in Lynn and grew up in Swampscott. At Swampscott High School, his daughter Debra H. of Ashland, Va., said, he was one of the school's ''first Jewish football players" and later returned as an assistant coach. He graduated from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis., in 1960 and stayed in the Midwest as a graduate fellow in industrial organization economics at the University of Minnesota, earning his law degree there in 1966.
He got a job with a big law firm in Minneapolis, where he began his involvement with the beer industry. In 1968, Mr. Rodman wrote in his curriculum vitae, he and his two partners got ''the first-ever injunction, stopping in its tracks a Hamm's beer termination of a two-truck wholesaler. The federal appeals court ruling became the framework for the first model beer franchise laws."
For a time in the 1970s, Mr. Rodman taught trade regulation law at Florida State University and cochaired the Florida attorney general's select committee to revise antitrust laws.
A prolific writer, Mr. Rodman has contributed to various legal publications and from 2000 to 2002 alone wrote six 9,000-word articles for the Modern Brewery Age magazine. In them, he once wrote about ''the whole truth about the drinks business you won't learn at Harvard Business School."
''Mark was one of the most brilliant guys I've ever met," Benjamin Steinman, publisher and editor of Beer Marketers Insights of West Nyack, N.Y., said yesterday. ''He had a remarkable repository of industry knowledge. He was kind of an iconoclast that often did not endear him to some because he didn't always tell people what they wanted to hear. Mark was a seeker of knowledge, always questioning. Yet he had a very warm side."
Mr. Rodman was also a listener and ''a master at reading between the lines," Jaglom said.
He acquiesced to the sometime designation as ''a curmudgeon," but was tenacious about his beliefs. Harry Schumacher of Beer Business Daily in San Antonio recalled in an e-mail a time when Mr. Rodman called him to task about an article. ''He ended up by saying people who hyphenate 'anti-trust' shouldn't be writing about antitrust. I suggested to him coldly that if he is to ridicule my newsletter, he ought at least to subscribe to it first." Schumacher said.
''Dad loved to think," his daughter Tori said. ''Think about business, think about the world, about his family and about things we hadn't ever thought to think about. He challenged us intellectually, made us question, forced us to look at an issue from all sides. He was interested in everyone and made them feel special. He had a very tender heart."
Above all, she said, Mr. Rodman loved his family, ''and always told us so. He was a proud father and often said, 'By your children, you shall be taught.' But really, we learned the most from him."
Besides his two daughters, Mr. Rodman leaves his wife, Kathy (Geuther); another daughter, Shana Youngblood of Miami; a sister, Claire Zajac of Delray Beach, Fla.; and his former wife, Cynthia Capewell of Miami.
Services have been held. 