93 / 114
A good friend of mine, Jack
Wright with Vitronic, was on
the PPAI Board of Directors and
wanted to quit because he had
other business interests and the
board was taking toomuch time.
He recommended to the board
that I replace him. And for some
crazy reason they agreed. I got
in there and then at the end of
my four-year term, I ended up
being chairman from1975-76.
At that time, the president of the
Association, Bob Rollings, and I
became very good friends and we
did a lot of things together. One of
the things we did was create
PPB
magazine [then called
Specialty
Advertising Business
] because we
were growing and we needed a
better publication. It worked very
well and it grew as the Association
grew. For a year, I wrote amonthly
article in themagazine critiquing
company catalogs that I thought
needed help. Some people still call
me today to critique their catalogs,
which I do for free.The other
thing [Bob Rollings and I did] was
planning tomove the Association
fromChicago to Irving, Texas. We
ended up finding the property
that they built the first building
on. [Rosenberg was inducted into
the PPAI Hall of Fame in 1983].
Later on, GeorgeMatteson (who
had a playing-card company in
Kansas City) and I got together
and were teachers in the CAS
certification program. He taught
about money and I taught about
sales, and we traveled for four or
five years as CAS educators. It was
great. We had a number of sessions
during the year all over the country
that lasted about a week at a time.
Howdid trade
shows evolve during
your career?
From the early 1940s to themid-
1970s, themain show of the year
was at the Palmer House Hotel in
Chicago. My company, Ritepoint,
and Skinner &Kennedy, Vitronic
and Len Bray were all St. Louis
companies and we all had one
section of the hall on the seventh
floor. We had a roomwhere we
could set up a bar and have food
and when a distributor walked in
you could close the door and talk
to them for an hour. It was really
great. Of course now you can’t do
that, you’ve got eight million people
running around the floors. We
kept outgrowing the venues, first
in Chicago, then in Dallas. When
the showmoved to Las Vegas, the
first year we went, the parking lot
hadn’t even been finished yet.
What did you do after
you sold Ritepoint?
I became a consultant to
industry suppliers. I created
Specialty Advertising Consultants
and I was one of the first
consultants in the industry so I was
in a very good position. I helped
a lot of companies—at least 30
or 40 suppliers—start out in the
industry.They would payme
$500 for a booth and I got them
their tables and their locations
and everything they needed.They
would bring their stuff and show.
They had an area when it was in
Dallas that was limited to the new
suppliers since new suppliers
didn’t yet have points [for booth
locations] if they weren’t yet
members of PPAI. New suppliers
could come to three shows and
then they had to decide if they
were going to bemembers or not.
I really started building up a
trade. When the PPAI Showwas in
Dallas, they had a lower level at the
convention center and they put us
down there.The second year on
the lower level, I had 42 booths. I
was right below the area where the
escalators came down and went up.
So as the show got bigger, some of
the suppliers who weremembers
started yelling because I had points
but my people didn’t and we were
right at the bottomof the escalator.
So they insisted that wemove.
Theymovedme to the far end of
the lower level, so we started a new
area down there. But they forgot
that the parking lot was at that end.
So people would walk in from the
parking lot right into our area, so
the upstairs was vacant for the first
hour or so because these guys were
coming to our area. Guys from
about five or six big companies
came downstairs and said, “Harry,
can we get into your area?” because
that’s where the action was for
the first hour of the show.
Julie Richie
Harry Rosenberg with PPAI President and CEO
Paul Bellantone, CAE, (right) and 2004 Hall of
Fame Inductee Bill Bywater of Bankers Advertising
Company (left) at the 2013 PPAI Chairman’s
Leadership Dinner at The PPAI Expo in Las Vegas.
One of the
things we did
was create
PPB
magazine [then
called
Specialty
Advertising
Business
]
because we were
growing and we
needed a better
publication.
|
SEPTEMBER 2016
|
91
CONNECT