A Brooklyn Life

Burt Kerr Todd, an entrepreneur, adventurer and
international deal maker whose quixotic dreams and outlandish schemes
more than occasionally paid off, as when he introduced the postage
stamp to the tiny kingdom of Bhutan or resold the gently used
Rolls-Royces of down-at-the-heels maharajas at a handsome profit, died
on April 28 at his home in Ligonier, Pa. He was 81.

The cause was lung cancer, his family said.

The son of a wealthy Pittsburgh steel, glass and banking family, Mr. Todd combined the larger-than-life appetites of an F. Scott Fitzgerald
hero with the lust for adventure of a 19th-century explorer. His exact
job defied description, though it entailed both the businessman’s art
of the deal and the confidence man’s gift of the gab.

Officially,
Mr. Todd was president of the Kerr-Hays Company, an importing and
manufacturing concern, now based in Ligonier, that he founded in 1963.
But even before that, and for many years afterward, his portfolio
included advising heads of state — mostly of small countries in Asia
and the Pacific — on attracting American investment. At one time or
another, Mr. Todd counted among his friends the sultan of Brunei, the
king of Bhutan and the premier of the island of Mauritius.

A
dazzling raconteur, Mr. Todd never lacked for material. He flew
airplanes and maintained an impressive collection of vintage cars. He
hunted leopards and rhinoceroses and was once treed in Bhutan by a
rampaging elephant. He knew everyone, could sell anybody anything and
was for years the bane of Pittsburgh long-distance operators, who were
obliged to patch him through to all manner of obscure places at all
manner of ungodly hours.

Impulsive, expansive, incurably
restless, Mr. Todd might bundle his family into their little jet on a
moment’s notice. His sense of direction was not the best, and they did
not always wind up where they intended. It rarely mattered. Wherever
Mr. Todd turned up, something exciting was bound to result: a marvelous
story, a new friendship or perhaps a deal involving rum, seaweed or
other interesting commodities.

"There was something like bat
guano," his daughter Laura Todd Widing recalled in a telephone
interview on Friday. "It’s good for something."

Mr. Todd finessed
his way into graduate school at Oxford despite having just a year of
college; trekked hundreds of miles through Nepal and was the first
American to visit Bhutan, the last of the forbidden kingdoms of the
Himalayas.

He once tried to found a small kingdom himself, on a
deserted coral reef in the South Pacific. Its entire infrastructure was
to be built on postage stamps. His dream was dashed, he later said,
after Tongan gunboats blew his island paradise to ruins.

Except for the gunboats, all of the above is true, Mr. Todd’s daughter said.

Burt
Kerr Todd was born in Pittsburgh on May 15, 1924, the son of Kirkland
W. Todd and the former Kathryn Kerr. By his own admission an
indifferent student, he attended the Choate School before enrolling at
Williams College. After the United States entered World War II, he left
to enlist in the Army Air Corps, where he became a radar instructor.

When
the war ended, Mr. Todd decided he would attend Oxford. His academic
record, or lack thereof, did not deter him. Oxford told him that
enrolling was quite impossible: the only official who could authorize
it was just then on his honeymoon in the remote Norwegian countryside.
Mr. Todd flew to Norway, tracked down the official and promptly
enrolled. At Oxford, his friends included a future leader of Fiji and
the future queen of Bhutan, the first person from her country to study
in the West.

Mr. Todd graduated in 1949 with a master’s degree in
law. Two years later, chafing in his family’s glass business in
Pittsburgh, he received a cable from the Bhutanese royal family
inviting him to visit. There was no air service, and few roads.
Entering Bhutan from India, Mr. Todd became one of the few Westerners
ever to see the country. His account of his journey appears in the
December 1952 issue of National Geographic.

In 1954, Mr. Todd
married Frances Hays, known as Susie, and the couple honeymooned in
Bhutan. Besides his wife and daughter Laura, both of Ligonier, Mr. Todd
is survived by another daughter, Frances Todd Stewart, of Pittsburgh; a
brother, Kirkland W. Todd Jr., of Nashville; and five grandchildren.

Retained
as an adviser by the Bhutanese royal family, Mr. Todd was asked to help
expand the country’s economic base. He suggested stamps, and in October
1962, Bhutan issued its first regular postage stamps.

In other
work, Mr. Todd helped Fiji to make rum and Singapore to market seaweed.
In India, he persuaded maharajas in financial straits to part with
their Rolls-Royces, which he resold to Western collectors. (One car, a
convertible Phantom III, came with a pop-up silver chair to accommodate
a footman.)

But it was for the Bhutanese stamps that Mr. Todd was
best known. Serious philatelists dismissed them as curiosities, and
indeed, under Mr. Todd’s direction, the stamps grew curiouser and
curiouser. Some were printed on silk, others on plastic.

Most
famous were the "talking stamps," small rounds of grooved rubber that
could be spun on a phonograph. One played the Bhutanese national
anthem; another, a spoken-word stamp, had Mr. Todd delivering a very
concise history of Bhutan.

Perhaps in tribute to his Pittsburgh
roots, Mr. Todd also had Bhutanese stamps printed on steel. They had a
distressing tendency to rust.