Robert W. Tyd, founder of LI shipping brokerage firm, dead at 92

Robert W. Tyd was a businessman who found his niche in the ship brokerage industry, crafting contracts to move cargo across international waters, but his strongest legacy was his unselfish and giving spirit, relatives said.

A longtime Bethpage resident, Tyd died on Feb. 20 of natural causes at home. He was 92.

“My father was a very honorable, fair person,” said his daughter Elizabeth Fackelman Smith, of Stow, Ohio.

A native of Brooklyn, Tyd grew up in Bay Ridge. His father died when Tyd was 12 or 13 and he was given the chance to attend for free a parochial Catholic school affiliated with the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. He graduated from St. Michael’s, no longer in existence, in 1941, relatives said.

He enlisted in the military during World War II and became an airman, but was not able to fly planes because he had hearing problems, relatives said. He was stationed in San Antonio, Texas, and remained in the service until the war’s end.

Tyd obtained his bachelor’s degree in business commerce in 1951 from Fordham University in the Bronx and later a master’s degree in business from that university, relatives said.

He worked in accounting at Simpson, Spence & Young in the late 1940s and became a dry cargo broker, staying with the company until 1963. He moved on to Gotaas-Larsen Shipping Corp. and rose to become a vice president.

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Tyd opened a ship brokerage consultancy in 1979, later worked as cargo representative for Smith and Johnson in Jericho. In the mid-1990s, he started Tydeship, a brokerage out of his Bethpage home. He retired in the early 2000s.

He met his wife, Margaret, in the late 1940s at a roller-skating rink in Brooklyn. They married in 1947 and moved to Levittown by the early 1950s. In 1954 they settled in their Bethpage home, where they raised six children.

Tyd was a founding member of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul in their St. Martin of Tours parish in Bethpage, relatives said, and he remained active with that charity group at St. Kilian’s in Farmingdale.

Relatives remembered his commitment. Once, moved by the need of a family he met through the charity, Tyd went home to gather donations from his household belongings.

They told of instances when he put others first — lending his savings to help a cousin in financial distress; putting a down payment on a house for a daughter or cashing out his stamp collection to keep another daughter in college.

“He was extremely generous,” said his son Robert J. Tyd, of Stamford, Connecticut. “He was very open minded and tolerant . . . and that carried over into how he treated his family.”

Other survivors include daughters Patricia James, of Bethpage and Drums, Pennsylvania, and Catherine D’Avanzo, of Wantagh; sons John Tyd, of Chandler, Arizona, and Christopher Tyd, of Bethpage; seven granddaughters; four grandsons; and a great-grandson.