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 …the birthing story of HRTS by its Founding President Jack McQueen
The scene: The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel Blossom Room
Action: A Luncheon Meeting of the Hollywood Advertising Club Fall 1965
Neil Reagan, Who was the broadcast guy for the McCann-Erickson ad agency, had been after me for some time to come to a Hollywood Ad Club meeting. He claimed that all the ad agency broadcasters belonged and that I needed to be a part of this. I never really argued with Neil, since he had just made the trades for casting his brother Ron as the host of DEATH VALLEY DAYS. I had no such comparable coup to serve up to Foote, Cone & Belding, my relatively new employer. So I went.
The room was dark and scruffy. I could barely see to eat my lunch. I later found that to be a blessing. My table was buzzing with excitement. The enthusiastic man to my right was bragging that he’d just closed the biggest sale of his career. I asked him if he sold radio or television time. “Are you kidding” he responded. “I sell advertising that actually gets into people’s pockets.” He wasn’t kidding. He peddled space on matchbook covers!
I then switched over to the man on my left who had the look of a successful time sales guy for one of the big networks. Wore a vest. Displayed a chained pocket watch. I almost didn’t ask, but since Reagan had told me that I’d find my brethren there in the room with the big, ugly flowers on the wall, I proceeded to discover that he, too, had experienced a great week. Just closed a big order for “car cards.” When he saw my puzzled disappointment, he explained that his product was those big ad cards that went on the sides of busses and cabs.
And of course the speaker that day was a guy from Chicago who was acknowledged as the King of end-aisle displays in supermarkets.
Right after that meeting was adjourned, a wonderful guy by the name of Jack O’Mara who worked for the TV Ad Bureau and I got a bunch of radio and TV folks together and hatched a scheme. We felt strongly that Hollywood deserved a professional society just for the radio and television business. The TV Academy had the Emmys and a few occasional gatherings, but there was no regular meeting place for broadcast people to mingle with their peers and hear from the real hitters in our business.
In 1966, by design, we moved away from the Roosevelt to Gene Autry’s then new Continental Hotel on the Strip and began to wean ourselves away from the matchbook and car card peddlers. “Travie” Traviesas of the BBDO ad agency (later an NBC censor) flipped a coin, and I presided over the inaugural year of HRTS. I was blessed with a great Board carefully selected from just about all facets of the broadcasting industry and we hit the ground running with an initial roster of 286 members.
It makes me feel great that our successors, with the invaluable help of Executive Directors Ollie Crawford and Gene Herd, have built HRTS into what we originally intended – the most important meeting place for the real pros in the radio and television industry.
THE ORIGINAL BOARD
Herminio Traviesas – BBDO
Ben Hoberman – ABC Radio
Betty Williams – Lennen & Newell
Harry Ackerman – Screen Gems
Bob Dellinger – Peterson Publishing
Rowe Giesen – ABC Television
Bob Light – Southern California Broadcasters
Kirk Munroe – Henry Christal Reps
Jack O’Mara – TVB
Jim Parks – Channel 4
Gerald Schnitzer – Commercial Producer
Donn Tatum – Disney
Harfield Weedin – CBS Radio
Paul Willis – Carnation
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