Julius Westheimer

Julius Westheimer (September 6, 1916 – August 31, 2005) was a financial advisor from Baltimore, Maryland. He is best known for his radio and television work, having dispensed financial advice on WBAL Radio, WYPR, WMAR, WBAL-TV and PBS' Wall $treet Week, and in columns in the Baltimore Sun, Baltimore Evening Sun, and Daily Record newspapers.

Westheimer was born on September 6, 1916, the son of Milton F. Westheimer, a Baltimore investment banker, and Helen Gutman Westheimer. In his youth, he published a neighborhood newspaper in Pikesville, Maryland, and he later edited the campus newspaper at Dartmouth College, where he earned a bachelor's degree in political science, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and graduated with honors in 1938. In his youth, he lived in his uncle's house at 1714 Eutaw Place in Baltimore.

He began work in the toy department at Macy's in New York for $35 per week. Following World War II, during which he served in the Army Air Corps, he returned to Baltimore to work at Gutman's, the department store founded in 1877 by his grandfather, Julius Gutman. Westheimer eventually became the company's president. In an interview with the Baltimore Jewish Times, he later confessed that he "despised every minute of it." Feeling that he "just wasn't cut out for the retail business," he merged Gutman's with the Brager-Eisenberg department store, and left to begin a career in investment banking.

Westheimer joined the Baltimore investment house of Baker Watts & Co., now Ferris Baker Watts, in Hunt Valley, Maryland, overseeing an investment management group for more than 30 years.

He married Ernestine Hartheimer in 1940, and they had two daughters. After her death in 1985, he married the late Dorrit Feuerstein Kohn (died November 29, 2009), in 1986. They were together until his death on August 31, 2005, six days short of his 89th birthday.