Donald J. Zoeller, Oyster Bay resident and Manhattan attorney, dies at 95

He successfully argued a precedent-setting case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Yet the family of Oyster Bay attorney Donald J. Zoeller remembers him as much for the Zoeller Family Singers.

"It was a weekend and it was raining and we didn't know what we wanted to do that day," recalled Jean Cavaliere, of Randolph, New Jersey, one of his and wife Susan Zoeller’s three adult children. "So he decided he was going to gather the ‘Zoeller Family Singers,’ and we spent the entire day singing songs he tape recorded on a reel-to-reel. My sister Diane was only in kindergarten and my brother Paul was playing rudimentary guitar. And he'd have Paul introduce me, and me introduce Diane and my mother ... I don't know how many people have memories like that, but they are super special."

On a phone call with four surviving family members, such memories tumble out, one example after another of spontaneous trips and mini-adventures — this despite Donald Zoeller’s demanding career as a Manhattan attorney and law firm executive in practices whose clients included multinational corporations.

"He was the most psychologically balanced individual I had ever met in my entire life," said Joseph Rizzi, of Connecticut, a law school classmate and a friend of nearly 70 years. "Never lost his temper, never got upset about anything. Nothing ruffled him."

"As a husband he was loving, he was kind," his wife  Susan said. "I can't remember ever having an argument with that man. And everybody that knew him and knew me said, ‘Oh my God, he adored you from Day 1 to the end.’ "

Donald Zoeller died of natural causes at South Shore University Hospital in Bay Shore on Nov. 22. He was 95.

The third of four children of Henry Adolph Zoeller, a Wall Street broker, and Marion Elizabeth Brodie Zoeller, Donald Zoeller was born on March 18, 1930, in Floral Park, Queens,  and raised in Woodhaven. After initially attending Brooklyn Technical High School, he graduated from Holy Trinity High School in that borough.

Zoeller went on to Fordham University, in the Bronx, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1951. He attended Fordham’s law school at night, receiving his bachelor of laws in 1958 after serving in the Korean War and returning home to work days as a clerk under federal Judge Irving Kaufman of the Southern District of New York.

He married classically trained singer Susan Josephine Campisi on Sept. 3, 1955.

"Our second date," she recalled, "was at the Mercy Ball," the annual gala for what is now Catholic Health Mercy Hospital in Rockville Centre. She regularly sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" with bandleader Vincent Lopez at those events, "And I said, ‘Would you be my date?’ So he rented a tuxedo and went with me. And there was a group of ladies sitting against the wall; they must've been widows." The singer said she "went over and greeted every one of them. As he put it, ‘Sue made their night.’ He went home to his mom and said, ‘I'm going to marry that girl.’ "

After training with the ROTC, Zoeller joined the U.S. Army’s 140th Anti-Aircraft Battalion, seeing combat in the Korean War. There, as he recounted in a video for the Korean War Legacy Project, he befriended a homeless orphaned boy, Suki. Zoeller and his unit gave him shelter, and the two became so close Zoeller wanted to adopt him and bring him to the United States.

"But it was not allowed for a single man to adopt," Susan Zoeller said.

Donald Zoeller eventually brought Suki to the Star of the Sea orphanage in Incheon, South Korea. Zoeller’s children decades later made attempts to locate him but were unsuccessful.

Admitted to the New York bar in 1959, Zoeller began a 36-year stint at the law firm eventually named Mudge Rose Guthrie Alexander & Ferdon, spending 20 years as head of the litigation department and eventually being named executive partner and chief executive. In 1995, he joined Carter, Ledyard & Milburn, becoming a partner there two years later.

While there, he became lead attorney in a 16-year case defending 21 Japanese electronics firms against accusations of predatory pricing. After succeeding at trial and being reversed on appeal, he appealed to the Supreme Court. Its ruling in 1986’s landmark Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. v. Zenith Radio Corp. case "dramatically altered the antitrust litigation landscape both procedurally and substantively," according to the Antitrust Law Journal in 2018.

In Oyster Bay, where he lived for 40 years, Zoeller was involved with the Rotary Club, the Railroad Museum and the Main Street Association. Additionally, he was a member of the Italian American Heritage Society of Long Island and of a Korean War veterans group. After retiring around 2002, Zoeller as late as the mid-2010s served multiple terms on the board of Oyster Bay-East Norwich public schools.

In addition to Cavaliere and Susan Zoeller, who with her husband moved to Sayville 3½ years ago, he is survived by daughter Diane Zoeller, of Bay Shore; son Paul Zoeller, of Conroe, Texas; eight grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

The family held no visitation, but will have a memorial service and a Mass on March 21 at The Church of Saint Dominic in Oyster Bay. Afterward, Zoeller, who was cremated on Nov. 24, will have his ashes buried at the Cemetery of the Holy Rood in Westbury.

Donations may be made to the Long Island chapter of the Alzheimer's Association.