OBITUARY Sidney Weiss December 25, 1922 – September 24, 2018 Sidney Weiss News Obituary – Life Story September 24, 2018 A noted certified public accountant whose career spanned nearly seven decades, Sidney Weiss died on September 24, 2018, after a brief illness. When he finally closed his practice three years ago, he was reportedly Maryland’s longest serving CPA, with a clientele that included senior government officials, doctors and lawyers, grocers and builders, relatives and neighbors. Born in New York City in 1922, he moved to Washington after World War II and in 1948 opened his first office at 1101 Vermont Avenue, N.W. Among his first clients was Eddie Ritz, founder of Ritz Camera, the photo-processing chain that at one time encompassed 675 stores nationwide.
After several moves, he settled his CPA practice in Silver Spring, Md. , where he counted among his clients presidential appointees, including John Koskinen, former Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service. For 68 years until his retirement at age 92, Mr. Weiss served a wide-ranging clientele.
For many years, he prepared the tax returns of an elderly priest with whom he took Italian lessons in the 1960s through Montgomery County’s adult education program. For a time, he served as the accountant for a strip club on Wisconsin Avenue; a rather proper man, he would ask his wife to accompany him when he went to the club to pick up its receipts. The youngest of five children born to Hungarian immigrants, Mr. Weiss was raised on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
As a youngster, he excelled at academics, attending college at age 15 and graduating three years later from the City College of New York, where he studied accounting and business. After a stint in the Army during World War II, including service with the Quartermaster Corps in the Philippines and New Guinea, he moved to Washington. There he earned a law degree from George Washington University, where he met an economics student who would become his wife.
He and Vivian Burke married in 1948 and had three children—Barbara, born in 1950, Michael, in 1952, and Ellen, in 1956. The couple remained devoted to each other until her death in 1989. Unlike the Hollywood stereotype of the “creative” accountant suggesting shady tax dodges, Mr. Weiss maintained Americans should be proud to pay their taxes.
“Do you see these roads and schools? ” his children recall him asking as they drove through their neighborhood in White Oak, Md. “Your tax dollars paid for these things.
It’s good to pay taxes”. When the family vacationed in Delaware, a tax-free state, he’d invariably ask sales clerks, “Don’t you feel guilty about not charging a sales tax? ” Mr. Weiss lived in Silver Spring for many years before retiring to Rockville, Md.
Survivors include three children: Barbara Morgenstern, of Rehovot, Israel; Michael Weiss (Phyllis Stanger), of Lewes, Del. ; and Ellen Franks (Gary Franks), of Silver Spring; and eight grandchildren. A funeral service will take place at Hines-Rinaldi Funeral Home (11800 New Hampshire Ave.
, Silver Spring, MD 20904) on September 27, 2018, at 11:00 AM, followed by interment at Mt. Lebanon Cemetery in Adelphi. In lieu of flowers, the family suggests donations be made in Mr. Weiss’s memory to the Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington and Washington Savoyards.
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