Ayer, Francis Wayland (04 February 1848–05 March 1923), advertising agent, was born in Lee, Massachusetts, the son of Nathan Wheeler Ayer, a teacher, and Joanna B. Wheeler. Ayer was educated by his father; he began his career at the age of fourteen in a school near Dundee, Yates County, New York, where he was a teacher for five years. Between 1868 and 1869 Ayer attended the University of Rochester in New York but was unable to complete his studies because of a lack of funds....
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Barton, Bruce Fairchild (05 August 1886–05 July 1967), advertising executive, writer, and congressman, was born in Robbins, Tennessee, the son of William Eleazar Barton, a Congregationalist minister, and Esther Treat Bushnell, an elementary school teacher. His father brought the family from Tennessee, where he had been an itinerant preacher, to Oak Park, Illinois, before Bruce was a year old, and there William Barton became pastor of the First Congregational Church. He held this post for twenty-five years, serving for a time as moderator of the National Council of Congregational Churches, and he published a distinguished biography of ...
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Bates, Theodore Lewis (11 September 1901–30 May 1972), advertising agent, was born in New Haven, Connecticut, the son of Vernal Warner Bates, a businessman, and Elizabeth Brooke Hails. After graduating in 1924 from Yale University’s Sheffield Scientific School with a B.S., Bates took a job with the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York City. Six months later the bank’s advertising manager contracted pneumonia, and Bates found himself performing that job. He later recalled that, without training, he relied heavily on the advice of his “very efficient woman assistant.”...
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Benton, William (01 April 1900–18 March 1973), advertising executive, educator, and politician, was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the son of Charles Benton, a Congregationalist clergyman and professor of romance languages, and Elma Hixson, a schoolteacher. After brief military service in World War I, Benton attended Yale University and graduated in 1921. In 1928 he was married to Helen Hemingway. They had four children....
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John N. Ingham
Bernbach, William (13 August 1911–02 October 1982), advertising executive, was born in the Bronx, New York City, the son of Jacob Bernbach, a designer of women’s clothes, and Rebecca Reiter. When he graduated from college (New York University, 1932), with a major in English, Bernbach faced the harsh facts of the depression. Jobs, especially in advertising, were few; the best he could do was take a position as an office boy with Schenley Distillers. Nevertheless, he mustered the enterprise to draft a promotional piece for Schenley’s American cream whiskey and submitted it for consideration. Although the advertising department did in fact use the ad, no mention was made of Bernbach’s having created it. But, his initiative having taken him this far, Bernbach went directly to the firm’s president, Lewis Rosenthiel, to tell him that he had authored the ad. The effort paid off: Bernbach was taken on by the advertising department....
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Robert J. McMahon
Bowles, Chester Bliss (05 April 1901–25 May 1986), businessman, politician, and diplomat, was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, the son of Charles Allen Bowles, a paper manufacturer, and Nellie Harris. His grandfather, Samuel Bowles (1826–1878), a man Chester frequently identified as his inspiration and role model, transformed the Springfield ...
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John N. Ingham
Burnett, Leo (21 October 1891–07 June 1971), advertising executive, was born in St. Johns, Michigan, the son of Noble Burnett, a dry goods dealer, and Rose Clark. Leo Burnett got his first exposure to advertising layout and copy by watching his father prepare ads for the local newspaper. His father’s connections got Leo his first jobs as a printer’s devil at the newspaper and a summer reporter on rural weeklies. After graduating from high school, Burnett served for a time as a rural schoolmaster before graduating from the University of Michigan in 1914. Then he became a police reporter for the ...
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James Harvey Young
Calkins, Earnest Elmo (25 March 1868–04 October 1964), advertising agent and writer, was born in Geneseo, Illinois, the son of William Clinton Calkins and Mary Harriet Manville. When Earnest was three months old, the family moved to nearby Galesburg, where his father became a self-taught lawyer, elected city attorney. Except for a brief period of private schooling, Calkins was educated in the public schools. When he was six, measles aggravated an inherited tendency and made him somewhat deaf. His hearing continued to weaken gradually until, in middle age, he became completely deaf. Overcoming this handicap became a central concern of Calkins’s life....
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Collier, Barron Gift (23 March 1873–13 March 1939), advertising entrepreneur and capitalist, was born in Memphis, Tennessee, the son of Cowles Miles Collier, a naval officer and artist, and Hannah Celeste Shackelford. Collier attended the Memphis public schools until age sixteen, when he dropped out to solicit business for the Illinois Central Railroad, to contract with the city of Memphis to improve the street lighting, and to learn advertising and selling for his uncle, owner of the ...
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Malcolm Goldstein
Dietz, Howard (08 September 1896–30 July 1983), lyricist and publicity director, was born in New York City, the son of Herman Dietz, a jeweler, and Julia Blumberg. While a student at Townsend Harris Hall, a public high school for unusually able students, Dietz took a job as a copyboy on a newspaper, the ...
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Walter E. Edge Seated, left, at a session of the Senate's Committee on Elections, 1921. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-104398).
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Edge, Walter Evans (20 November 1873–29 October 1956), New Jersey businessman and political leader, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of William Edge, a railroad manager, and Mary Elizabeth Evans. In 1877 his family moved to Pleasantville, New Jersey, and in 1887 he took a job as a printer’s devil for the ...
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Michael B. Dougan
Lamb, Theodore Lafayette (11 April 1927–06 September 1984), southern liberal, advertising executive, and lawyer, was born in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Foster Lamb, a butcher, and Theodosia Braswell. Lamb’s father owned a small farm near Alexander, outside of Little Rock, Arkansas, where Lamb grew up. After attending the local one-room school, he hitchhiked into Little Rock, where he attended high school and served as class president. In 1944 he took classes at both Little Rock Junior College and Louisiana State University before enlisting in the army. He was sent to Yale University and trained as a Japanese linguist. He then served from 1944 to 1947 as a second lieutenant in the army’s 441st Counterintelligence Corps. He returned to Yale under the GI Bill and graduated in 1950....
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Kevin L. Keenan
Lasker, Albert Davis (01 May 1880–30 May 1952), advertising executive, was born in Freiburg, Germany, the son of Morris Lasker, a merchant and banker, and Nettie Heidenheimer Davis. Both parents, who were American citizens, were in Germany at the time of his birth so that his mother could be treated for poor health. When he was six weeks old, the family returned to Galveston, Texas, where he was raised as one of six children....
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David Marc
Levy, David (02 January 1913–25 January 2000), advertising and broadcasting executive, television producer, and writer, was one of twin sons born to Benjamin Levy, an accountant, and Lillian Potash Levy of Philadelphia. He excelled as a student, especially in mathematics and writing, both of which would remain lifelong pursuits. An economics major at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, he received a B.S. degree in 1934 and an M.B.A. in 1935....
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Dennis Wepman
Ogilvy, David (23 June 1911–21 July 1999), advertising executive, was born David Mackenzie Ogilvy in West Horsley, about 30 miles southwest of London, England, the son of Francis John Longley Ogilvy, a stockbroker, and Dorothy Fairfield Ogilvy. Brought up in a cultured family—his father was a Cambridge-educated classics scholar and a cousin was the writer Rebecca West—Ogilvy nevertheless spent an impoverished childhood because of the failure of his father's business. At the age of thirteen, however, he won a scholarship to Fettes, an elite public school in Edinburgh, and at seventeen he won another to Christ Church, Oxford, where he studied modern history. After two years there Ogilvy concluded that he was not cut out for the scholarly life. “Perhaps it was impatience with academe and the itch to start earning a living,” he later wrote. “Perhaps I was intellectually out of my depth. Whatever the reason, I failed every examination” ( ...
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Francesco L. Nepa
Resor, Stanley Burnet (30 April 1879–29 October 1962), advertising executive, was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Isaac Burnet Resor, a stove manufacturer, and Mary Wilson Brown. After receiving his early education in the Cincinnati public school system, Resor enrolled at Yale University, where he worked his way through school by tutoring and selling subscriptions to a history of the Bible door-to-door. He had hopes of teaching economics, but by the time he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1901, his father had lost control of the family’s stove manufacturing firm. Thus, Resor could devote no more time to schooling and instead went to work in a Cincinnati bank for a $5-a-week wage....
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Elliott Roosevelt Henry A. Wallace, Elliot Roosevelt, Harlow Shaple, and Jo Davison, 1947. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-117441).
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Roosevelt, Elliott (23 September 1910–27 October 1990), advertising executive, public figure, and author, was born in New York City, the son of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the thirty-second president of the United States, and Eleanor Roosevelt. He attended Groton Academy in Massachusetts (1923–1929) and Hun School in New Jersey (1929–1930). He declined to follow the family tradition and did not go to Harvard but entered the business world instead. He was an advertising account executive in one firm (1930), vice president of another (1931), and then an account executive in yet another (1932). He became aviation editor for the ...
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Eileen Margerum
Rubicam, Raymond (16 June 1892–08 May 1978), advertising agency executive, was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Joseph Rubicam, an import-exporter, and Sarah Maria Bodine. He was raised by older siblings following his mother’s collapse after his father died when he was five. He left school in the eighth grade and lived in several states before settling in Philadelphia. Rubicam settled on a career in advertising at age twenty-three after a wide variety of jobs. F. Wallis Armstrong, his first employer, reflected advertising industry opinion: “A copywriter is a necessary evil, but an art director is just a damned luxury.” For three years Rubicam wrote ad copy that gradually gained Armstrong’s grudging respect. He married Regina McCloskey in 1916; they had three children....
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