Grand Old Adman

The grand old man of U.S. advertising, Stanley Burnet Resor, 81, stepped down last week after 44 years as chief executive officer of J. Walter Thompson Co., the biggest advertising agency in the world.

When Resor, who headed Thompson's Cincinnati office, bought out Commodore J. Walter Thompson in 1916, the agency's billings were $3,000,000. Last year they totaled $328 million. Resor pioneered in market research, required copywriters to know almost as much about a product as the manufacturer, and shied away from gimmicky ads. With the help of Resor's wife Helen, Thompson was among the first ad agencies to hire women and to make a play for the woman's market, won such accounts as Lever Bros., Pond's and Kraft Foods. Thompson was also the first U.S. ad company to go abroad, now has 36 foreign offices, boasts that its ads can reach 65% of the total population of the free world, 85% of its purchasing power.

J. Walter Thompson has often behaved contrary to the Madison Avenue image (its offices are two blocks away on Lexington Avenue). Thompson still makes no presentations to get an account because it says it does not know enough about a prospective client to do so. It turns down products whose increased consumption it believes is not in the public interest (e.g., questionable patent medicines), and has no hard-liquor accounts.

To continue these policies, Resor chose as his successor Norman H. Strouse, 53. Strouse, born in Olympia, Wash., worked for a time in the advertising department of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, joined Thompson's San Francisco office as a space buyer in 1929. After World War II service on General MacArthur's staff in the Pacific, he was assigned as Thompson's account executive to Ford in Detroit. He handled the job so well that he was made a vice president in 1947. In 1955 he was chosen over 84 other vice presidents as president of J. Walter Thompson. Since then Strouse has won a reputation as a builder of new business, has also won back such multimillion accounts as Standard Brands and RCA. Madison Avenue competitors describe Strouse as "a good organization man in the best sense of the word."

Other changes of the week: P: John Bruce Bonny, 57, was elected president of the Morrison-Knudsen Co., the world's biggest publicly-owned heavy construction firm (1959 construction completed: $236 million). He succeeds Harry Winford Morrison, 75, who, with the late M. H. Knudsen (TIME cover, May 3, 1954), founded the company with $600 in cash 48 years ago and who will continue as chairman. San Francisco born. Jack Bonny started in the construction business after graduating from the University of California in 1925, joined Morrison-Knudsen in 1931, as a project manager. He became a vice president in 1943 and general manager in 1947. As president, Bonny will take over a $400 million backlog for new construction that includes foreign operations in 18 countries, new dams and power plants, a series of experimental nuclear-reactor plants, new factories and research centers, roads, and bridges.

P: Fortune Peter Ryan, 49, was elected president of the Royal McBee Corp., succeeding Philip Zenner, who died this week. Ryan is the grandson of freewheeling Financier Thomas Fortune Ryan who helped found the Royal Typewriter Co. in 1906. Pete Ryan started with Royal as a service man in 1934, after leaving Yale and spending two years in Wall Street. He became a vice president in 1948 and president in 1951; after Royal merged with the McBee Co. (data-processing equipment) in 1954, he became executive vice president of the combined company.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.