Walter Loeb, regarded industrywide as the “dean” of retail analysts and consultants, passed away peaceably Wednesday night at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Loeb was 100.

A funeral service will be held Monday at the Central Synagogue, 123 East 55th Street, at 11:30 a.m. It will be livestreamed.

A statement from the family provided to WWD said: “Walter lived a remarkable life and was an inspiration to so many people. He achieved incredible career success despite experiencing so much adversity. But the main word that comes to mind when we think of him is family — his love for his wife of 68 years was limitless, and he was the larger than life patriarch of the entire extended family.”

The always jovial Loeb made a career out of calling it right and frequently calling it ahead of the pack. His blue-chip reputation as a retail analyst began at Johnson Redbook Service and blossomed at Morgan Stanley, where he worked for 16 years and became a principal.

After reaching retirement age and leaving Morgan Stanley, he formed the Loeb Associates consulting firm. He served on the boards of Hudson’s Bay Co., Wet Seal, Gymboree, ProfitLogic, Motherswork, Investcorp and other companies; booked speaking engagements at universities and corporations around the country, and penned a newsletter.

“I guess the biggest call, very early on, was with Wal-Mart and Sam Walton. I recommended Wal-Mart when it was doing $273 million in annual sales in the early Seventies,” Loeb told WWD in a 2016 interview. “I also recognized the growth potential of Home Depot very early, in the early Eighties.”

Loeb was also among the very few that immediately doubted Ron Johnson’s bold re-imagination of JCPenney from 2011 until 2013, which alienated shoppers and almost destroyed the store. While Amazon was still in its formative stages, he foresaw the threat it would eventually pose to brick-and-mortar retailers.

Well into his 80s and 90s, Loeb continued to monitor the industry, frequently blogged on Forbes.com, and attended industry events. The National Retail Federation honored him with a 2016 Influencer Award for impacting the industry for decades.

His secret sauce was a blend of 20 years’ worth of actual retail experience — most analysts don’t have any — and a drive to get to know the retailers themselves, not just their stores. He was able to maintain an unusually high degree of access to the captains of the industry. The list included Stanley Marcus, Gordon Segal, David Glass, Bruce and Blake Nordstrom, Lew Frankfort, Burt Tansky, Leonard Lauder, David Farrell, George Meyer, Edward Finkelstein, Terry J. Lundgren and Olaf Koch.

“I have often learned about their families and I told them about my family,” Loeb once said. “At one point, I could reach almost anybody in the industry. I did not go to business school, but I worked for Macy’s and May Co. and as a result, I knew and understood the problems of seasonality and I was talking to managements more as a peer than as an analyst.”

Loeb also used data, tried to find out what was selling or not, examined employment figures, and considered the impact of non-retail sectors on retailing.

On giving investment advice, he was guided by what he referred to as a “three-legged stool.” “First, I had to know the company had a direction that is very clear and visible. Second, that it had underlying opportunities for future growth, and the third goes back to management — its trustworthiness. I look for companies that have a vision of the future. There are very few companies that have time to formulate a vision because they are constantly fighting the current economic environment.”

Another key to his success was his personality — affable yet sometimes blunt, outspoken yet always in a civil manner. People also respected that Loeb stayed connected to the industry decades after when others typically chose retirement. He also had keen interests in theater, music, travel and religion; spoke five languages; once wrote classical music reviews for a magazine called Musical Leader, and was a lover of art, specifically, Southwestern Native American art.

In his sprawling Riverside Drive apartment in Manhattan, Loeb had a collection of 2,000 or so pieces of Native American artwork he and his wife, Phyllis, accumulated from many trips to the Southwest. It’s a museum-quality collection of pottery, wood sculpture, baskets, paintings, stone carvings of animals, carpet weaves and about 400 kachinas, all evoking regional imagery, sacred traditions and ceremonies and spiritual beliefs.

Loeb was born in Germany in 1925 in Darmstadt, and lived mostly in Frankfurt growing up. His family escaped the Holocaust by emigrating to Italy. When Italy sided with Germany in World War II, Loeb’s family emigrated again to Cuba and finally to the U.S.

After graduating from high school in 1943, Loeb became a citizen and was drafted. He participated in the Normandy invasion, landing on Utah Beach. His assignment was to unload bombs for an airfield in France, until a German bomb exploded, bursting an eardrum, so Loeb was evacuated to England. He was reassigned to advanced communications and asked to translate a German engineering book on the Remagen Bridge, which Hitler intended to destroy. After Loeb translated the book, the Allies were able to deactivate explosives concealed in the bridge, enabling soldiers to cross the Rhine River into Germany.

After the war, Loeb attended New York University, majoring in marketing and history, and later worked in the advertising department at the former Goldblatts department store in Chicago before shifting to Macy’s advertising department in New York. He became a section manager in Macy’s holiday toy department, and later a home-furnishings department manager. A hankering for returning to Europe motivated him to work for a general merchandise retailer called PK Halstadt before returning to the U.S. as a financial analyst for the Johnson Redbook Service. In 1974, he joined Morgan Stanley as a retail analyst, becoming only the second Jew hired by the firm.

Retail doors swung wide open for him.

“When Sam Walton was alive, it was a close relationship,” Loeb said. “I remember him driving me back to my hotel in Arkansas, when he pulled out a shotgun and started shooting at his dog, yelling, ‘I told you to stay home.’ He wasn’t trying to hit the dog, but he was shooting.”

Loeb was engrossed by Walton’s “concentric” expansion strategy. “He would [build] a distribution center and grow stores around it. He had a very specific way of growing. He had a vision of expanding through the U.S., but his vision did not include the world.”

When he turned 100 last January, Loeb celebrated in a big way, with three parties at his apartment, for family, friends and former colleagues. And in his usual good spirits he wore a cap that read on the front, “100 never looked so good.”

Loeb is survived by his wife of nearly seven decades Phyllis; daughter Lisa Handelman; her husband Ken; daughter Karen Lifford and her husband Jack; daughter Martha Loeb, and six grandchildren.

EDITORS NOTE: This obituary is largely based on Walter Loeb’s life story documented in an article appearing in WWD in 2016.