An Advertising Pioneer
[Editor's Note: Herb Bissell passed away in June 2007, after his Tuck Today interview, just as he reached the age of 100.]
Herb Bissell's first job after Tuck paid $22 a week. But considering that he walked out of Hanover and right into the Great Depression, he was probably lucky to join N.W. Ayer & Son, the country's first advertising agency, to work on the Ford Motor Company account. "I came out of Tuck at an inappropriate time," he said with notable understatement. But times managed to get better, and Bissell became one of a very few Tuck centenarians this past June.
Bissell married his first wife, Rachel, in 1931 under worsening economic circumstances and remembers that they budgeted $8 a week for food. He continued to work at Ayer for 10 years, until the agency lost the $10 million Ford account and the ax fell. The couple had two young children and found themselves living in "a pretty sad setup." It was then that Rachel came across a colorful ad in Collier's Weekly for the Electric Auto-Lite Company in Toledo and encouraged her husband to apply for a job.
It was at Auto-Lite—a young, successful company and pioneering advertiser—that Bissell's career really took off. Except for his paycheck. "It doesn't seem possible," he said, "but I recall being paid less than $10 a week." One of his primary responsibilities for $10 a week was working on the Auto-Lite–sponsored radio show Everything for the Boys, a program targeted to World War II soldiers, and, later, Suspense, a highly successful crime drama on CBS radio from 1942 until 1962. Since each episode featured a different actor, Bissell was rubbing elbows with stars such as Orson Welles, Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, and director Alfred Hitchcock.
Ultimately, Auto-Lite broke into television, and Bissell and his colleagues were credited with the initial growth of TV advertising. "We were pioneers in the use of television at Auto-Lite. It took a lot of courage because there wasn't much return from only 10 stations."
Soon Bissell had developed a national reputation and was honored in 1949 as the Industrial Advertising Man of the Year. Even that publicity paid off: Auto-Lite competitor Honeywell took notice and hired him as director of merchandising in 1950. He remained at Honeywell in Minneapolis until he retired in 1972 as vice president, corporate marketing. (In a twist, Autolite, as it is known today, is now a brand of the Honeywell Consumer Products Group.)
Already twice widowed, Bissell met his third wife, Marge, during a volunteer stint at his church. They married in 1999. "Can you imagine a 79-year-old woman marrying a man 93 years old?" he would ask. "People always get a kick out of that."
Bissell's last trip to campus was for his 70th Dartmouth reunion with eight of his classmates, including his slightly older friend, Harold "Rip" Ripley D'29, who lives in Lebanon, New Hampshire. Bissell credited Tuck as a major source of support throughout his life, especially when he was seeking his first job during the Depression. Witness to vast changes in the world at large, Bissell also saw Tuck change since he graduated. "I've been very much impressed by the school's growth of prestige," he reflected. "It's a far cry from when I was there. Today Tuck is a significant, prestigious, leading business school, and it's very rewarding to me to see what happened."
