Zigman was influential PR man
Civic leader helped to create symphony orchestra, UW-Milwaukee Foundation
Robert S. Zigman, a leading public relations man who practiced his craft quietly but left a major imprint on Milwaukee, has died. He was 98.
A renowned networker and a good listener, Zigman knew where the local levers of power were, and how to move them.
The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, the United Performing Arts Fund, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Foundation — Zigman was a driving force in the creation of all of them.
And he relentlessly pushed the corporate executives who were his clients to support those and other organizations with what he called “eleemosynary activities” — charitable giving. Not only did it enhance life in the community Zigman loved, he would explain to them, it was good public relations.
“Milwaukee flowed
through his veins,” Craig Peterson, who joined Zigman’s public relations firm in 1986 and later bought it, said via email.
Zigman died Wednesday at the Milwaukee Catholic Home. But until very recently, he had been living in his Mequon condominium.
“He had a great, just a phenomenal life,” said his son, Robert W. Zigman.
For decades beginning in the early 1960s, two firms dominated public relations in Milwaukee. One was run by Ben Barkin. The other — Zigman Joseph Skeen, later Zigman Joseph Stephenson — was Zigman’s.
The competition between them, Peterson said, was heated, personal and sometimes reflected in their clients:
Barkin had Schlitz; Zigman had Pabst. Barkin had First Wisconsin National Bank, the long entrenched local institution. Zigman had First Bank, an interloper from Minneapolis looking to stake a Milwaukee claim. During the morethan-decade-long battle over how to pay the billions for the deep tunnel and other sewer improvements, Barkin represented “wet” companies that used lots of water; Zigman had
their “dry” counterparts.
Barkin, who died in 2001, cut a showman-like figure, famously bringing the Great Circus Parade to Milwaukee and seldom hesitating to drop the names of celebrity friends.
“Bob on the other hand fit in more as a CEO or a member of your board, and that’s really the way he wanted it,” Peterson said in an interview. “He used to joke that, ‘We don’t do parades here.’ ”
The restrained style worked.
“He would primarily just listen to people and then he would offer guidance,” Peterson said. “But he was not a PR guy in so much as offering marketing strategies or ways to get more publicity; he was offering business advice.
“He loved business, and he had quite a knack for understanding numbers. We’d walk into a factory and he’d start asking the CEO all sorts of questions and minutiae about how everything would operate, and like a sponge he would just take it all in and then he would gather those observations and make recommendations to the CEO.
“He wasn’t treated as a PR guy; he was treated as a peer.”
Born in Milwaukee, Zigman graduated from Riverside High School and headed to the University of Wisconsin to study journalism. But his academic career was interrupted by World War II.
Commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant in 1942, Zigman served in the China-Burma-India theater, where he trained Chinese army officers, earned the Bronze Star and was promoted to captain.
He’d been interested in military history since childhood, visiting veterans at the home at Wood, and as a teenager hitchhiking to Gettysburg, Pa., for the last reunion of Union and Confederate soldiers.
World War II, though, was another story. Zigman was injured when he was hit by shrapnel from a land mine, and lost partial hearing in one ear, his son said.
After the war, Zigman graduated from college and took a marketing job with Milprint, a Milwaukee printing and packaging company. He left in 1959 to start a PR firm with his friend, Jules Joseph.
Around that same time, efforts to transition from the old Milwaukee Pops Orchestra to a full-fledged symphony were jelling, and Zigman was deeply involved. In 1959, he helped found the MSO, and quickly was named its first business manager. For the next 15 years, he guided the organization, first as business manager, then as president.
Along the way, in 1967, he was one of four founders of UPAF. And in 1974, as he was stepping away from active management at the MSO, he led the founding of the UWM
Foundation, which became the university’s primary fundraising entity.
With Zigman’s symphony work, musical notables called on him when they came to town, his son said.
“I met Andre Kostelanetz,” he said. “Arthur Fiedler (was) at the house all the time. … Jack Benny called him his Milwaukee manager.”
With his wife, Dorothy, who died in 1997, Zigman frequently hosted dinner parties bringing diverse groups of people together.
“That’s what he did best, making connections,” his son said. “Ever since he was a young boy he always had a knack for networking.”
Zigman retired from Zigman Joseph Stephenson in 1989 but remained active as a consultant and a fund-raiser for various organizations.
And while the days of going to lunch at favorite downtown restaurants like the old Toy’s or the Watts Tea Shop passed, Zigman still liked to get out. Until about a year ago, he regularly attended the every-other-week sales meetings at construction management company CG Schmidt, a former client.
“He was a great connector,” his son said.
Besides his only son, who has a marketing firm in Fort Collins, Colo., Zigman leaves no immediate surviving relatives. No services are planned.