Robert Fluhr, 84, retired Philadelphia schoolteacher

Robert Fluhr, 84, a Philadelphia public school ceramics teacher who studied art in Mexico and taught the subject in England, died of complications from renal failure and heart disease Monday, June 20, at Hahnemann University Hospital.

He began teaching in the Philadelphia School District in 1952, retired in 1982, and spent most of those years in the industrial-arts program at Northeast High School, daughter Suzanne said in a phone interview.

Mr. Fluhr had two careers outside the school, she said.

In the 1950s and 1960s, he taught night art classes at the Lighthouse, on Lehigh Avenue near Front Street in Fairhill. Its website states that it offers educational, recreational, and economic-improvement programs.

And in summers from the 1950s into the 1980s, he was head of the art department at the Lighthouse Art and Music Camp in Pine Grove, Schuylkill County, continuing there when it became the summer camp of Eagle Springs Programs.

Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., Mr. Fluhr graduated from Midwood High School there and earned bachelor's degrees in education and fine arts at the Tyler School of Art in 1950 and a master's of fine arts in ceramics at Alfred (N.Y.) University in 1952.

He took the 1963-64 academic year as a sabbatical from teaching and studied with a potter in San Miguel de Allende in the Mexican state of Guanajuato, his daughter said.

In the 1969-70 year, her father used the Fulbright Teacher Exchange Program to teach art at the Devizes School in Wiltshire, England, she said.

Residents of West Mount Airy from the late 1960s into the 2000s, Mr. Fluhr and his wife, Annette, were board members of the Allens Lane Art Center from the 1960s into the 1980s.

In 2004, the center gave the Fluhrs its Lifetime Achievement in the Arts Award.

Since 1988, Mr. Fluhr headed the Vision Thru Art program there, teaching sculpting to blind and visually impaired people. He was a board member of National Exhibits by Blind Artists, a nonprofit in Center City.

He was a member of the East Mount Airy and West Mount Airy neighbors associations, his daughter said, and was a member of the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality in the 1950s and 1960s.

Besides his wife and daughter, Mr. Fluhr is survived by daughters Jennifer Tumberello and Madaline Fluhr-Resendes and three grandchildren.

A life celebration has been set for 1:30 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 14, at the Germantown Jewish Centre, Lincoln Drive and Ellet Street. The family has asked that RSVPs for the event be sent to suzannefluhr@gmail.com.