Alexander Wallace Dreyfoos, Jr. (1932- ) was born in Mount Vernon, New York, and graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard Business School. In 1963 Dreyfoos co-founded Photo Electronics Corporation, which moved to West Palm Beach in 1968. Dreyfoos and his company hold many patents, including the LaserColor printer and a motion picture video analyzer, which received an Oscar in 1971; an earlier version is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution. Dreyfoos owned controlling interest in WPEC-TV Channel 12 from 1973 to 1996, when he founded The Dreyfoos Group, a private capital management firm. He owned the Sailfish Marina on Singer Island from 1977 to 2004.
Dreyfoos is credited with bringing the arts to Palm Beach County, starting in 1978 with formation of the Palm Beach County Council of the Arts, now the Palm Beach Cultural Council. He led efforts that created the debt-free Kravis Center for the Performing Arts in 1992, and guided it through fourteen profitable seasons while reaching out to the entire community. By making the largest private contribution ever to a private school, in 1997 Dreyfoos helped the Kravis Center’s neighbor, the former Palm Beach High School, become a state-of-the-art magnet high school for the arts, which was later named for him. He has also significantly supported the Scripps Research Institute, MIT, and the Intracoastal Health Care Foundation, and was a founder of the Economic Council of Palm Beach County.
Some of the many tributes to Dreyfoos have come from United Way’s De Tocqueville Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars of the Smithsonian Institution; he holds honorary doctorates from Lynn University, MIT, and Scripps’ Kellogg School of Science. A fellow Kravis supporter called Dreyfoos, an “I-can-do person.”