American Inventor, Real Estate Developer and Philantropist. Marotta, a former pro football player who had also signed with Major League Baseball’s St. Louis Cardinals, was a co-creator of the Mr. Coffee machine that eventually replaced the standard percolator found in most American homes. A star athlete, he was signed as a center fielder by the Cardinals soon after he graduated from high school, but World War II intervened, and after serving in the Army, he earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Mount Union College in Alliance, Ohio. In 1948, he was drafted by both the New York Giants of the National Football League and the Cleveland Browns, then in the All-America Football Conference and played briefly with the Browns before going into business as a developer of homes and shopping malls. In 1972, during a drop in the real estate market, with the help of his business partner, Samuel Glazer and two engineers, Marotta designed Mr. Coffee, the world’s first electric drip coffee maker. Originally priced at a then-steep $39.99, the machine was an instant success. The following year, he used his salesman’s combination of hard work and aggressiveness to convince Joe DiMaggio, baseball Hall of Famer and coffee-abstainer, into being the appliance’s spokesman. With DiMaggio as its pitchman, sales of Mr. Coffee soared, with the company eventually employing more than 1,000 workers who created 42,000 machines per day. Marotta, who served as chairman and chief executive of the company until it was sold in a leveraged buyout in 1987, died of natural causes. (bio by: Louis M.)