Howard Stein | Dreyfus Corp. chief, 84

Howard Stein, 84, a former chief of the Dreyfus Corp. who as one of the fathers of the mutual fund industry introduced innovations such as the first money market fund with no initial fee, died Tuesday of complications from a stroke at his home in Southampton, N.Y.

Mr. Stein was a powerful force in bringing stock and bond investment to the general public. He broadened the mutual fund market by flooding potential investors with direct mail, rather than using salesmen. He helped devise the famous Dreyfus television commercials in which a lion stalks out of a subway. He not only invented the first "no load" money market fund - meaning no up-front fee - but also created the first tax-free municipal bond fund. He was the first to sell an American mutual fund in Japan.

He was adept at picking investments, notably Polaroid in the company's early days. His instinct to go for what he called "unloved" stocks and against market trends was legendary. When Mr. Stein joined Dreyfus as a young analyst in 1955, it had about $2 million in assets. At the time of its sale to the Mellon Bank Corp. in 1994, it had assets of $80 billion.

During the 1970s, Stein set up a fund to invest in companies that had shown unusual concern for the environment and for consumers. He recruited people from outside the conventional business world, such as the journalist Bill Moyers, to join Dreyfus' board.

He was an early critic of the Vietnam War. In 1968, he took a six-month leave of absence to be chief fund-raiser for Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy's antiwar presidential campaign. He was on President Richard M. Nixon's enemies list.

Howard Mathew Stein was born in Brooklyn to immigrants from Poland. By his own account, he pursued his formal education between encounters with truant officers.

He looked for work on Wall Street and became a trainee at Bache & Co. He left Bache in 1955 and joined Dreyfus, where he soon became an assistant to Jack J. Dreyfus Jr., the firm's founder, chief executive officer, and chairman. He became president in 1965, and chairman and chief executive in 1970.

In 1994, the Mellon Bank Corp. of Pittsburgh acquired Dreyfus in a stock swap valued at $1.85 billion. Mr. Stein continued as Dreyfus' chairman and chief executive, joined Mellon's board, and was reported to have made about $90 million from the deal. He resigned in 1996. - New York Times News Service