 Photoillustration by Bruce Andre and John Paxson
by Tim Steury
Fairs being fairs, even Century 21 had to end. And that meant that
on September 1962, a little more than two years after taking on the
publicity (and ticket sales) for the Seattle World’s Fair, Jay
Rockey was out of a job.
It’s not as if there weren’t any other jobs in Seattle. But
public relations was what Rockey loved and what he was good at.
However, “There wasn’t much public relations around here then,” he
says.
There was Sid Copland, an ex-journalist. Cole and Weber was just
that, two guys named Cole and Weber. There was one guy at Boeing,
one at Weyerhaeuser, and that was basically the Seattle PR
industry. The whole Puget Sound chapter of the Public Relations
Society of America could have sat around this table, he says. It’s
not a big table.
So Rockey did the only thing he could do, short of heading back
to New York. He started his own company. Things could have been
worse. Even though it had to close, the fair wasn’t going to go
away. You don’t just tear down the Space Needle. The Seattle
World’s Fair became Seattle Center, and the day after the fair
closed Rockey announced the opening of the first client of Jay
Rockey Public Relations, the Pacific Science Center.
So that was the happy beginning of a long, happy story. But what
about the next 45 years?
Well, here’s Randy Pepple: “I view Jay as the founder of the PR
industry in the Northwest.”
Pepple might be a little biased, seeing as he’s CEO of what is
now Rockey Hill & Knowlton, which is the result of Hill &
Knowlton’s buying The Rockey Company a few years ago. But Pepple
swears he never spins. And besides, everyone else says the same
thing. Then there’s the fact that the Puget Sound PRSA lifetime
achievement award is called the Jay Rockey Award.
But “the founder” of Seattle PR?
“PR is still a relatively young industry,” says Pepple, who
started as a journalist with the Seattle Times and moved
through public affairs and politics before settling in at the
Rockey Company just before it joined Hill & Knowlton. “John
Hill, the founder of Hill & Knowlton, is seen as one of the
founders of the industry in the United States. Hill & Knowlton
celebrated its 50th anniversary five years ago.”
The industry does have deeper roots, but not much. And public
relations in its early days took a slightly different approach than
many are comfortable with today.
Edward Bernays, the profession’s first theorist, drew heavily on
his uncle, Sigmund Freud’s, ideas about the unconscious motives
that drive human behavior. Brilliant though he was, Bernays got the
profession off to a less than savory start. He had little respect
for the average person’s capacity for dignity, leaning blatantly
toward propaganda to drive people’s “herd-like” behavior.
You might say that Jay Rockey made a career of being Bernays’s
antithesis.
“I would describe his style as, he’s the ultimate gentleman,”
says Jennifer West, director of the Spokane office of Rockey Hill
& Knowlton. Rockey bought Jennifer West Public Relations in the
late ’90s. “And he’s extremely honorable, in every facet of his
work with people. He’s very gracious and humble, but at the same
time he’s a brilliant practitioner.”
“I think the agency approaches PR in a little more old-school
fashion,” says Simmi Singh ’00, until recently an account executive
with Rockey Hill & Knowlton. Old-school, I might point out, as
in the genteel 1960s, not the roaring ’20s of Bernays. “We don’t
think we need giant media stunts,” says Singh.
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