UNC School of Dentistry's Tarrson Hall Namesake, Bud Tarrson Passes Away

E.B. "Bud" Tarrson, the UNC School of Dentistry's most generous donor and namesake of the School's new clinical teaching facility, Tarrson Hall, passed away Tuesday from complications from open-heart surgery in Chicago. He was 85.

Tarrson was the former chairman and chief executive officer of the John O. Butler Company, the Chicago-based maker of toothbrushes, dental floss and other oral hygiene products. He joined the company in 1949, the same year the UNC School of Dentistry was founded. He went on to build Butler into one of the world's largest and most respected manufacturers of dental products.

"All of dentistry, but particularly the UNC School of Dentistry, is profoundly saddened by the unexpected death of Bud Tarrson," John Stamm, dean of the School and a longtime friend of Tarrson's, said. "Bud's genius lay in bringing preventive dentistry into the modern era, and his vision for dental education was represented by his generous philanthropy to numerous dental institutions, but specifically the UNC School of Dentistry. In his latter years, Bud and his wife, Linda, became true blue Tar Heels."

The Tarrsons contributed $2 million to the School in 1992 to help build the $21.6 million clinical teaching facility. The Tarrsons visited Chapel Hill for their first tour of the facility in operation in February of this year. The School of Dentistry's students and faculty members logged more than 100,000 patient visits in the five-story, 84,000-square-foot building in 1998.

"Mr. Tarrson's lead funding of Tarrson Hall has done so much for our School that the students, faculty, staff and myself send our most respectful condolences to his wife, Linda Tarrson, to his daughter, Marla, and to his two sons Ron and Steve," Stamm said. "Bud's influence and memory will be far-reaching, but nowhere more so than at UNC-Chapel Hill."

Tarrson and his brother began their careers as salesmen for a company that marketed Butler toothbrushes. In 1949, Tarrson's brother bought Butler and made Bud its manager. In 1965, his brother sold the company to Bud Tarrson.

In 1984, Tarrson took the Butler Company public, but he and his family retained 70 percent of the stock. Four years later, a Japanese company offered to buy Butler for nearly $160 million.

"I never wanted to sell," Tarrson said. "I loved the business and the people. But the Japanese company let it be known that they were willing to buy at a big profit to the shareholders."

He stayed on with the company for two more years, and then retired in 1990. In his retirement, Tarrson established fellowships, donated toothbrushes around the world and created a dental research foundation. He made gifts to the dental schools at Columbia University and the University of Southern California, as well as to the UNC School of Dentistry. He reprinted and bound a rare collection of research papers and distributed them to the libraries and departments of periodontology at all U.S. and Canadian dental schools. He was an honorary member of the Academy of Periodontology and the American Dental Association.

Last modified: