Lois Wyse,
ad executive,
in 1997
Advertising executive, author and columnist Lois Wyse, who coined the memorable catchphrase "With a name like Smucker's, it has to be good," died Friday [July 6, 2007] after a long struggle with stomach cancer, her family said. She was 80.
Wyse died in her Manhattan home shortly after midnight and 18 months after her cancer diagnosis, said her son-in-law, Henry Goldman. During her lengthy career in advertising, Wyse raised the glass ceiling for other working women while counseling clients from American Express Co. to Revlon Inc. to one-time Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes.
She created the advertising slogan that propelled Smucker's from a small Orrville, Ohio, jam and jelly business into an international brand. Her suggestion that a small chain of stores try a new name - Bed, Bath & Beyond - helped expand that business into a retail heavyweight.
Wyse launched her career as a teenage reporter with The Cleveland News and The Cleveland Press, becoming a columnist age 17. She worked with photographer Alfred Eisenstadt for a Life magazine piece when just 18, and later wrote for Vogue and Cosmopolitan.
Wyse, after co-founding the Cleveland-based Wyse Advertising with her first husband in 1951, came up with the Smucker's campaign while working as her company's creative director. She advised Stokes during his 1967 run, when he became the first black mayor elected in a major American city.
Wyse, who later divorced Marc Wyse, opened her advertising company's New York office in 1966.
As a writer, Wyse penned "The Way We Are" - a column featured on the last page of Good Housekeeping magazine for 13 years, where she recounted tales of her life and family. She also wrote more than 60 books, including the 1989 best-seller "Funny, You Don't Look Like a Grandmother."
Wyse was survived by her daughter, Katherine, and son-in-law Henry Goldman; son Robert and daughter-in-law Denise Wyse; stepson Zev Guber and wife Heidi; and eight grandchildren. Her second husband, theater producer Lee Guber, died in 1988.
Funeral arrangements were not complete; the family was planning a memorial service.
Copyright 2007 Associated Press.
Lois Wyse, an advertising executive whose love of words yielded a famous slogan and more than 65 books, died yesterday at her home in Manhattan. She was 80.
The cause was stomach cancer, said Henry Goldman, her son-in-law.When Wyse Advertising, the agency that Ms. Wyse founded with her first husband, Marc, won the J. M. Smucker Company account, it was Ms. Wyse who came up with the line, still used today, “With a name like Smucker’s, it has to be good.” It was also she who suggested that a small retail chain called Bed and Bath would fare better as Bed, Bath & Beyond. And in 1967, it was she whom Mayor Carl B. Stokes of Cleveland, the first black mayor of a large American city, turned to for communications advice.
Ms. Wyse was the first woman on the board of the Consolidated Natural Gas Company and the Higbee Company. She was also a founding member of the Committee of 200, a group of women with executive jobs, and of Catalyst, a women’s research organization.
Twenty years ago, when New Woman magazine chose Wyse Advertising to create its first television advertising campaign, Ms. Wyse was widely quoted as saying that all women become “new women” at various times in their lives: when they marry, when they give birth, when their children go to college, when they get a job. Ms. Wyse embodied that idea in both her writing and her private life.
Lois Wohlgemuth was born in Cleveland, the only child of a homemaker and a dress salesman. She was a voracious reader who loved to write. As a teenager, she edited her high school newspaper and even wrote a column, Teen Tricks by Lois, for The Cleveland News. She attended Flora Stone Mather College, now part of Case Western Reserve University, but left after two years to become a reporter at The Cleveland Press.
Soon after, she married Marc Wyse, and in 1951 they started the advertising agency in their name. This year, it was bought by employees. Mr. Wyse was chairman and chief executive, and Ms. Wyse was president and the creative force behind the company’s work. In 1966, Wyse opened a New York office, and Ms. Wyse began spending most of her time there.
Through it all, she wrote fiction and nonfiction, poetry and children’s stories. She contributed a column for Good Housekeeping called The Way We Are. She was a founder of City & Company, which published books about New York and was later sold to Rizzoli. She also wrote the lyrics for a musical, “Has Anybody Here Found Love?,” which appeared at the Manhattan Theater Club in 1978. Lee Guber, already well known on Broadway, was a producer. The Wyses divorced in the late 1970s, and in 1982, Ms. Wyse married Mr. Guber.
“Writing fiction is a kind of escape,” she said in a New York Times interview in 1982, after she had written 45 books. But her first best seller was her 47th book, and it was not fiction. It was “Funny, You Don’t Look Like a Grandmother” (Crown, 1989), in which she noted that in her grandmother’s day, grandmas “did not know from gyms, exercise or second marriages,” while today’s grandmother is “zapping around Paris, with or without a husband.”
The book’s timing was bittersweet; Mr. Guber died of cancer in 1988, before the book came out.
Ms. Wyse is survived by her daughter, Katherine Goldman; her son, Robert; a stepson, Zev Guber; and eight grandchildren.