David Ehrlich

David Howard Ehrlich died on March 23, 2025 of natural causes, at the age of 87.

Mr. Ehrlich was born in Cambridge, Mass., on June 30, 1937, into a Boston retailing family that traced its ancestry to the department store Jordan Marsh. His father was Richard Adolph; his mother the former Virginia Howard of Los Angeles, whose sister had married the film producer Samuel Goldwyn. Growing up in Brookline, Mass., he attended Milton Academy (class of 1954); Yale College (1958), and Harvard Business School (1961).

Retaining close emotional ties throughout his entire life to his education, he enjoyed attending and helping to mount the quinquennial reunions at all three. He was also a lifelong member of the St. Botolph Club in Boston.

His working career included five years at Bloomingdales in New York, and twelve at Touraine Stores in Boston, the family firm. Moving to Washington in 1979, he spent time at the Smithsonian Institution and as an adjunct teacher at Marymount University.

A serious student of both history and geography, he traveled the world from Iceland to Yemen and most places in between, jesting that he’d been to Paris many more times than California. And haunted by the Lincoln assassination, he found an additional calling as a costumed docent for more than 20 years at the Mary Surratt museum and tavern in Clinton, Md.

Classical music, however, was his most consuming love. “Forced” to learn the piano from his father at the age of six, he came to love it. After a forty-year career of singing tenor in a series of choruses (the Cantata Singers in New York, Cecilia Society and Chorus pro Musica in Boston; and Paul Hill Chorale and Bach Consort in Washington), and associated administrative responsibilities, he became fascinated, through workshops at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, with the piano’s role in classical chamber music. In 1997, he founded an amateur concert series, the Southwest Chamber Players, that gave some 200 performances in Washington, and elsewhere.

He married twice: first to Daphne Abeel, a Milton classmate, in 1964, and then in 1985 to Barbara Brannan, who survives him. Two brothers, Peter of Bedford, N.Y., and Daniel of Albany, Oregon, predeceased him. Numerous nephews and cousins populate much of the country, but his closest affection has been for his seven far-flung “play-daughters” Suzanne Gomez (Panama); Kalina Dimitrova (London); Judit Jaksa (Nagydorog, Hungary); Ramesh Mazhari and Dilyana Kirova (Washington, Julia Goudimova (Lexington, Va); and Visnja Kosanovic (Sydney, Australia).

David, but to the community they inhabited together since 1979. Barbara, whom David loved to call “the grey eminence of Southswest” will one day have her own obituary, which will document the encyclopedic role she played over fifty years. Moving here since 1970, she played a significant role in everything that has happened here. She picked David up a sorely (emotionally, if not physically) wounded David in 1981, helped build his self-confidence and comfort as they built and inhabited a stately home at 501 H Street.

A memorial service for David will be held at St. Augustine’s Catholic Church Sunday, May 25 at 4pm.

https://saintaugustine-dc.org/

To plant a tree in memory of David Ehrlich, please visit our Tribute Store.