Robert T. Wright, 94, who held six patents on the stenograph machine and who was an attorney who was instrumental in the founding and construction of the College of Lake County in Grayslake, died Saturday, Oct. 21, in South Shore Hospital after a heart attack. In the mid-1940s, Mr. Wright and his father, also an inventor, founded Stenograph Machines Inc. of Skokie and Chicago, which is how he came to be a patent holder on a machine that makes it easier for court reporters and secretaries to quickly transcribe official proceedings. Starting in the early 1960s, he also led a group that drafted the referendum proposal creating the College of Lake County, where Mr. Wright served on the board of trustees from 1971 until 1977 and as chairman of the board in 1976. He served on the board of the the college’s foundation from 1974 until his death. He moved from Oklahoma to Lake Bluff when he was 14. He went to Northwestern University, where he obtained his law degree, and then worked for the Securities and Exchange Commission for a few years, shutting down illegal stills in the South. In 1935, he married the former Ruth Tuells, who died in 1991. He remarried the next year to the former Rose Mary Harris. A former police magistrate for Lake Bluff in the early 1940s, he lived briefly in Antioch before moving to Libertyville, where he headed the Libertyville Board of Education in the early 1960s. He retired as president of Stenograph Machines in 1978. Mr. Wright is survived by his wife; a son, Peter; two daughters, Judith Duba and Virginia Jacobs; a sister, Jeannette Stone; and eight grandchildren. Visitation will begin at 1 p.m. Sunday, with services at 2 p.m., in the McMurrough Chapel, 101 Park Pl., Libertyville.
