Larry Kuzniewski
Harold Burson is back in Memphis after eight decades.
Harold Burson makes his way into his office piloting his stylish Nitro walker and parking it by his desk. He’s not moving all that fast since he recently broke a femur. He’s also 98 years old, which gives him the right to go at whatever speed he feels like, although it soon becomes clear that he’s a bit impatient with the situation.
“I do physical therapy on Tuesday and Thursday,” he says. “My goal is to walk with a cane by the end of the year.” If you doubt him, it’s at your own peril since Burson is supremely confident that he will achieve whatever he decides to do.
He’s called a “founding father of public relations” in headlines although he’ll modestly demur, saying that such a reference is “a bit of a stretch.”
One thing that he does, and that he’s always done, is to work whenever he can. In fact, that’s what he does the rest of the week on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. He’s at the Memphis office of Burson Cohn & Wolfe these days having relocated earlier this year from the New York headquarters of one of the world’s top public relations firms, or as they now say, a global communications agency.
Burson founded the company’s predecessor, Burson-Marsteller, in 1953, and quickly took it to the top. The agency might even be called legendary, although that’s an overused term these days, but in this case, it holds up. He’s called a “founding father of public relations” in headlines although he’ll modestly demur, saying that such a reference is “a bit of a stretch.”
But you’d be hard pressed to prove otherwise once you look at his extraordinary career in which he reshaped the very notion of public relations.
After decades in the fast lane at the New York nerve center of commerce and living in the posh suburb of Scarsdale for 54 years, he felt he had to move. That broken femur was a motivator. “If you can’t get around New York you might as well not be there,” Burson says. He’s resigned to the fact, but he’s more about moving on.
He opted for Memphis, where he grew up. “As I got a lot older, the nostalgia of getting back to my roots started influencing me,” he says. “My favorite niece is here in Memphis. She has a nice home and said if I wanted to come down here and live with her I could, so I took her up on it. I still wanted to have something to do, so BCW established an office here seven or eight years ago. If we hadn’t established it I probably would not come here.”
So whatever the pull of nostalgia, Burson won’t choose it over getting some work done. And he has a full plate.
He sits in a chair in front of the desk, ready for an interview with another in a long string of journalists who have been meeting with him since he returned to Memphis this summer.
Burson is dressed in a peppermint shirt and comfortable New Balance walking shoes. He speaks softly and marshals his thoughts carefully. The stories he tells have been told many times, not only to the journalists, but also in books and speeches. And what fascinating stories they are.
His beginnings in Memphis, though, give a sense of who he is and how he developed his entrepreneurial gifts. His parents came to Memphis from England in December 1919. His father had been in Memphis earlier, coming from the textile town of Leeds and working here in the cotton trade. But he happened to be back in England in August 1914 and was drafted to fight in World War I. He was gassed in 1915 in France and it affected his health the rest of his life. But he was determined to spend that life in Memphis.
“He taught me everything,” Burson says. “He was a voracious reader.”
And he taught young Harold to read starting at age 3, first by using the ads in The Commercial Appeal, and then the headlines. That love of words took root as did the senior Burson’s advice: “You’ve got to be in the know.”
Harold Burson with Amy Wolfe, VP of operations at Burson Campaigns. Photograph by Larry Kuzniewski.
He was so accomplished that he was in first grade only about three days when they moved him to second grade. And he was there less than a week when they moved him to third grade. The only skill he lacked was in cursive writing. “I tried to play catch-up and it was probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
That early start meant that he was always younger than his peers even into college. But it never presented a problem. He wound up going to Humes High School and he notes that he and Elvis Presley (who was there 13 years later) are both in the Humes High Hall of Fame.
Burson, exposed so young to newspapers, quite naturally decided he wanted to be a reporter for The New York Times. He got his start at Humes as the school’s correspondent, writing copy that ran in The Commercial Appeal’s Sunday edition on a page devoted to the city’s high schools. His editor was impressed with his industry and offered him a summer job as a copyboy at the CA.
When he was graduating from Humes, the Tri-State editor at the CA suggested he go to Ole Miss. The university there had a similar correspondent position. Burson jumped at it. “I was a stringer down there for four years,” he says, “and we had a deal: If I wrote it, he’d run it. At 14 cents a column inch, that paid my way through Ole Miss.”
Burson spent a couple of years traveling around the country with the head of the construction firm, attending meetings, meeting people, and learning how things worked. “That was my Harvard business school,” he says.
He was still planning to go to New York, imagining he would be “discovered” much like Turner Catledge, who went from a Klan-fighting reporter in Mississippi, then to the CA, and finally to The New York Times. Burson, after graduating from Ole Miss, went first to the Dyersburg, Tennessee, bureau of the CA and then a few months later to the Jackson, Tennessee office.
But then World War II upended nearly everyone’s well-considered plans. Burson, though, was well educated not only in school but by having worked several years with a daily newspaper. When the Army decided to build the Milan Ordnance Depot (now the Milan Army Ammunition Plant), he was covering it for the CA. “The story started reaching national significance,” Burson says, “because you had a big union contractor in non-union territory. Local subcontractors, all of whom were non-union, thought they were going to miss that slice of pie.”
The head of the construction company saw the need for having good media relations and approached Burson, asking him to take a leave of absence from the CA to handle PR. “I saw my editor and told him about it and he said, ‘I’ll give you a leave of absence but you’ll never come back.’”
True enough.
Burson spent a couple of years traveling around the country with the head of the construction firm, attending meetings, meeting people, and learning how things worked. “That was my Harvard business school,” he says.
In 1943, Burson went into the Army and was assigned to a combat engineer group whose main occupation was pulling mines. Working for engineers in civilian life apparently meant that he was qualified to do engineering work for the Army in Europe. All Burson wanted to do was to write for the Stars and Stripes newspaper.
Larry Kuzniewski
Burson's original typewriter.
As it happened, the week before Germany surrendered, Burson got a transfer to the American Forces Network, which sent radio broadcasts throughout Europe. He spent several months in liberated Paris, and then got the assignment of a lifetime: covering the trials of the Nazi brass in Nuremburg. He was the youngest correspondent there and got to meet established and up-and-coming journalists such as Walter Cronkite, Howard K. Smith, and Pauline Frederick.
He attended the trial sessions and would write daily 15-minute reports. He didn’t read them over the air, however. “I had more of a Southern accent then than I do now,” he says. But his work was trusted. “One of the amazing things was that no one saw my script or heard it until it went over the air.”
During the time he worked with AFN, the seeds of his public relations career were being planted. He talked with some people he met and realized that PR was, at the time, “pretty much a cottage industry. I started learning about American companies coming over to Europe and European companies going to America. I felt that public relations should be, and could be a global business.”
And that’s what launched a Memphis boy into the world of PR. He would meet ad-man William A. Marsteller and they would lead the way in combining advertising and public relations, doing it on an international scale. Before it merged with BCW last year, Burson-Marsteller comprised 77 offices and 85 affiliates in 110 countries across six continents.
“There’s a balance of life in Memphis, and the environment doesn’t have the hustle and bustle of New York.”
Burson still, as he puts it, “manages to keep busy.” He sits in meetings, listens and observes young people, gives speeches, and is putting together another book of articles and speeches. In Memphis, he enjoys meeting PR people at the top local companies. He likes it. “There’s a balance of life in Memphis, and the environment doesn’t have the hustle and bustle of New York.”
So what’s his take on Memphis after living elsewhere for seven-plus decades?
“The one feature that I have been most impressed by is the trees,” he says. This area when I left was just getting started and the trees were six feet high. I think they are as beautiful as any part of the United States.”
He also likes the maintenance of the roads and the wide highways. He can’t wait to go to the zoo and he expects to make a visit to Graceland. He is astonished at how “a new city has been created east of Highland Avenue. When I was here before 1940, anybody going east of Highland was up to no good. You had the bootleggers and the roadhouses.” And as a one-time newspaperman, he finds the current status of the daily print media “jarring.” He still carries his Newspaper Guild membership card with him.
He misses his wife, Bette, who died in 2010. They’d been married 62 years. But now in Memphis he’s closer to his son, Mark, who teaches at Ole Miss.
Finally, after two hours, the interview is over. If the reporter is feeling the effects of sitting in one place that long, Burson shows none of it. The staff at BCW moves in efficiently and gets him ready for his next appointment. There is work to be done.
