Rash's Surname Index
Notes for Thelma PACKMAN
Thelma Packman Gray, 91, of West Chester, a pioneering advertising and public-relations executive, died of heart failure Dec. 29 at home.
Mrs. Gray became a partner with Gray & Rogers in 1945, and established the Philadelphia ad agency's public-relations division. Jerome B. Gray and Edmund H. Rogers had founded the firm in 1931, and the late 1940s its clients included Bell Telephone of Pennsylvania, Chilton Publishing Co., local hotels, and food and drug companies.
In 1948, when a new client, the Allied Florists Association wanted to gain national exposure on a limited budget, Mrs. Gray had a brainstorm. That year, both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions were in Philadelphia, so she arranged to have a committeewoman present a floral arrangement in the shape of a flag to Thomas Dewey the night the Republicans nominated him as their presidential candidate.
No photos of the flowers were published in the media for the Republican convention, so Mrs. Gray decided on something more elaborate for the Democratic convention. In her memoir, she related how a Liberty Bell floral arrangement was presented to nominee Harry S. Truman. The arrangement included a drawer containing 48 pigeons representing each state. (Doves were unavailable.) When they were released, one landed on the podium where Truman was standing and another on his wife's hat. Major newspapers and national magazines included photos of the pigeons in their convention coverage.
In her memoir, Mrs. Gray also gave an account of what could have been a public-relations disaster. Earlier in 1948, Pyrene Fire Extinguishers contacted the agency for advice after an extinguisher "froze" during a fire. It was soon discovered that 60,000 other Pyrene extinguishers had the same problem.
Although Pyrene lawyers worried about lawsuits, Mrs. Gray persuaded the company to organize a recall. Newspapers ads explained the problem and provided information about replacing the extinguishers. Newspapers and radio stations were given press kits and urged to produce stories. Because Pyrene did the right thing, Mrs. Gray said, consumers trusted the company, and sales increased because the ads alerted people to the need for extinguishers.
Pyrene's chief legal counselor later told Mrs. Gray: "I'll bet this was the first recall program, and it will be the last. No company would dare take the risk Pyrene did." Instead, she wrote, "recall became a household word."
Mrs. Gray resigned as a partner at Gray & Rogers when she married Jerome Gray in 1960. She continued to consult for the company and in the 1970s and 1980s ran her own PR firms.
In 1971, she initiated a women's division at Gray & Rogers after she informed its executives in a memo that the old cliché "the consumer is king" had become "the consumer is queen."
She told an Inquirer reporter, "There's a tremendous amount of marketing directed to the consumer and primarily women, but most of it misses the boat."
She maintained that the psychology of how to reach women had to change. "It's rather silly," she said, "to have men telling women how to do laundry, dust, mop floors, and how to dress or what deodorant to use."
In 1976, Mrs. Gray helped organize the Bicentennial rendezvous at Valley Forge of wagon trains representing different states. In 1982, she was involved in the participation of the Queen Elizabeth 2 ocean liner in Philadelphia's Century IV festivities.
She wrote articles on public relations and advertising and received numerous awards, including a silver medal from the American Advertising Federation and a Silver Anvil from the Public Relations Society of America. She is a member of the Philadelphia Public Relations Association Hall of Fame, and was especially proud of being cited in Editor and Publisher as one of five people who had done the most to develop public relations as a profession, said her niece, Hedra Packman.
Mrs. Gray graduated from West Philadelphia High School and earned a bachelor's degree from Temple University.
In addition to her niece, she is survived by nephews Charles and Ira Packman. Her husband died in 1986.
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