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Steven Gluckstern, who pushed for mortgage relief, dies at 71

    “He knew it would be impossible to get into it,” Judy Gluckstern said in a phone interview. “He was frustrated, but he didn’t grow grass. He moved on to the next.”

    Mr. Gluckstern’s subsequent ventures include founding and owning a new independent minor league baseball team, the Chicago Dogs, in 2018, and helping start element6 Dynamics, a hemp company, in New Mexico, also in 2018

    Steven Mark Gluckstern was born on May 1, 1951 in New Haven, Conn. His mother, Norma (Block) Gluckstern, was a psychologist who served as director of the maximum security Patuxent institution in Maryland in the 1980s; his father, Robert, was a nuclear physicist and chancellor of the University of Maryland.

    Two years after graduating from Amherst College with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and science in 1972, Mr. Gluckstern earned a doctorate in organizational change from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

    That year, he established an alternative educational program for seventh and eighth graders at a high school in Scarsdale, NY, where he taught math and science. He then served as principal of an elementary school in Tehran and was an education consultant and superintendent of schools in Telluride, Colorado, during the 1980-81 school year.

    With a growing interest in business, he received an MBA from Stanford University, which led to an entry-level job as an investment banker at Lehman Brothers. Two years later, he was named Chief Financial Officer of Healthco, a dental products company that Lehman had floated on the stock exchange.