Alan Gleitsman, 76; Film and TV Show Distributor Created Award for Social Activism

For Alan Gleitsman, the future was as black and white as the episodes of “Felix the Cat” that helped make him a millionaire.

With the sale of his feature film and television library in 1986, he could afford to indulge his social activist side by giving away $100,000 a year.

“I wanted to recognize people who make a difference, tell their story and make other people aware of what one person can do,” Gleitsman told the Los Angeles Times in 1991.

Gleitsman, who established the nonprofit Gleitsman Foundation in 1989, suffered a heart attack while traveling in the south of France and died May 19 at Princess Grace Hospital in Monaco, his family announced. He was 76.

Among the first recipients of what was initially called the Gleitsman Award for People Who Make a Difference was Deborah C. McKeithan, who founded Handicapped Organized Women, the nation’s first such self-help group, after a stroke left her severely disabled.

Over the years, the honorees’ names became more recognizable -- Ralph Nader, former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, actor Mike Farrell -- and sometimes controversial.

Jack Kevorkian, the assisted-suicide advocate, shared the award in 2000 with a death penalty foe. Gleitsman called Kevorkian “a selfless believer in death with dignity,” but some protested the choice.

When the foundation began honoring activists outside the United States in 1993, it singled out Nelson Mandela, then president of the African National Congress, and Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng.

Gleitsman traveled the world handing out awards. Each year’s honorees split the $100,000 and received a sculpture by Maya Lin, designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Arrangements are being made for Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government to continue giving the award, said Cheri Rosche, Gleitsman’s companion of 29 years.

Although award nominations are solicited from various opinion-makers, a panel of judges makes the final decision. The first panel included feminist Gloria Steinem and Candace Lightner, founder of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

The pleasure of notifying the winners Gleitsman kept for himself, making the calls from the foundation’s headquarters, his home on a bluff in Malibu.

Gleitsman liked to say he came from the poorest family in the richest section of Great Neck, N.Y.

Born in 1930, Alan Leslie Gleitsman was the son of a jewelry supply salesman. His father died when Gleitsman was 9, and his mother worked as a secretary to support him and a sister.

In 1951, Gleitsman graduated with a bachelor’s degree in economics from Cornell University and spent two years in the Air Force. Later, he established scholarships at his high school, Cornell and UCLA.

After working in the textile industry selling piece goods, Gleitsman turned to television, which was starting to catch on in 1955.

Landing a job with Sterling Television, a small program distributor in New York, he peddled such programs as “Bowling Time” and “Movie Museum” mainly to independent stations with airtime to fill.

By 1958, he was running a one-man office in Los Angeles for Sterling. When the company merged with the Walter Reade Organization, Gleitsman became vice president for television.

He launched his own distribution company, Alan Enterprises, in 1970.

His film inventory “was not going to give Paramount a lot of worries,” Gleitsman once recalled, but it included many foreign films that had been dubbed for television, Laurel and Hardy episodes, the animated series “The Mighty Hercules” and “Speed Racer,” and Abbott and Costello shows.

Eventually, Gleitsman’s company took over Reade, and he acquired the “Felix the Cat” cartoons, which seemed to be of little value at the time but proved profitable.

Reportedly interested in colorizing his black-and-white film library, which included “The Count of Monte Cristo” (1934) and “The Man in the Iron Mask”(1939), Color Systems Technology bought his company in a multimillion-dollar transaction.

Finally, “I had a lot of money,” Gleitsman said in 1990. He just had to figure out how to start giving it away.

Gleitsman had been divorced for almost 40 years. In addition to Rosche, he is survived by daughters Lisa McCloskey of West Hills and Judy Kaplan of Westlake Village; son Rick of Woodland Hills; a sister and six grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at 10 a.m. Wednesday at Leo Baeck Temple, 1300 N. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles.