Samuel Glazer, a Creator of Mr. Coffee, Dies at 89 Samuel Glazer, a co-founder of the company that gave the world Mr. Coffee, one of the first and most popular automatic drip coffee makers to appear on American kitchen counters, died on March 12 in Cleveland. The cause was complications of leukemia, his wife, Jeanne, said. Before Mr. Glazer and Vincent Marotta came up with the idea, the two most common ways to make a cup of coffee at home were to percolate it (smells good but can taste bitter) or to stir instant coffee in boiled water (not as good as brewed). Good friends since high school, the two men had been partners in a series of businesses for more than 20 years, particularly real estate development, when they bought a coffee delivery company serving the Cleveland area in the late 1960s. On the delivery trucks were bulky, stainless steel commercial coffee dispensers. "Can we get one of these for the house?" customers would ask, Mr. Glazer's son, Robert, said in an interview. It gave the partners an idea. They hired two former Westinghouse engineers, Edmund Abel and Erwin Schulze, to create a compact, stylish version of the commercial dispenser. Their effort led to Mr. Coffee, in which water enters an electric heating element at the top, then trickles into the coffee grounds in a disposable paper filter before emptying into a glass pot resting on another heating element to keep it warm. To avoid the bitterness that boiling can cause, it heats the brew to only about 200 degrees. Introduced in 1972, Mr. Coffee caught on quickly. The parent company, North American Systems, sold more than a million units within three years. Although more established appliance manufacturers created their own versions, Mr. Coffee would gain and hold approximately 50 percent of the market share into the late 1970s. A large reason was the baseball legend Joe DiMaggio. He was the public face of the company for 14 years, promoting Mr. Coffee in print advertisements and television commercials. In one commercial, a voice asks of the hitting great, "You're pitching for Mr. Coffee?" In 2002, the trade publication Home Furnishings News listed Mr. Coffee among the most important home products of the last 75 years. Mr. Glazer and Mr. Marotta sold the company to a securities firm in an $82 million leveraged buyout in 1987, a year after it had sales of $120 million. Mr. Coffee is now a brand of the Sunbeam Corporation. Samuel Lewis Glazer was born in Cleveland on Feb. 24, 1923, to Isador and Yetta Gross Glazer. His father died when Sam was 6, and for years Sam supported his family, first by delivering newspapers and then by selling dog food to stores and boots to steelworkers. After serving stateside in the Army during World War II, he joined with Mr. Marotta to form a company that built garages, sold garage doors and eventually developed real estate, including homes and shopping malls in many states. The partners sold much of their property to finance the coffeemaker enterprise, which at its peak had nearly 1,000 workers. Mr. Glazer's wife, the former Jeanne Berger, and his son are his only immediate survivors. For Mr. Glazer, who lived in Beachwood, a suburb of Cleveland, Mr. Coffee was a readily available gift. He often spent time in California, where he became friends with Johnny Carson. "Please, Sam, I don't need any more coffee machines," Mr. Carson once said, Ms. Glazer recalled.