Oral History of the Month, August 2008
Alfred R. Bader was born in 1924 in Vienna, Austria. As a boy of fourteen, Bader had to leave his native country to escape Nazi persecution. He first fled to England, but a year later he was deported from Great Britain to Canada as an “enemy alien.” Bader spent the next eighteen months at a Canadian refugee internment camp, after which he had difficulty gaining admission to a university in Canada because of anti-Semitic quotas. After dogged persistence, in 1941 Bader began his studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Bader earned a B.S. in engineering chemistry, a B.A. in history, and a M.S. in chemistry at Queen’s University. Bader then immigrated to the United States, where he earned his Ph.D. in organic chemistry at Harvard University in 1949.

In August of 1951, Bader founded Aldrich Chemical Company, which would become a billion-dollar enterprise. Bader oversaw Aldrich’s merger with Sigma Chemical Company and served as president of first Aldrich and then Sigma-Aldrich Corporation for a total of twenty-five years. In 1992, Bader left the board of the company to which he had devoted forty years of his life to pursue another of his passions: art history and art dealing. Bader is now a full-time art dealer and operates an art gallery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In addition to giving the Ullyot Public Affairs Lecture in 2003, Bader visited CHF the same year to give a Brown Bag Lecture on our collection of alchemical art.