KOSSMAN/KLEIN WILL CLOSE AFTER 39 YEARS
An elder sage of the advertising business in Memphis, Jerry Klein is stepping back and closing his longtime ad agency. “I’m never going to quit,” he remembered telling his kids, Jan and Julie. “One day soon enough I’ll be slumped over in my chair. Why quit now? I have to stay busy.’’ Well, fast forward a few years since he spoke to the sisters. COVID-19 has reshaped America. Klein and his wife, Juliet, and the daughters are healthy. But the world shifted. Here’s the thing:
Klein has wound down a half-century-long career in advertising and public relations that began in the 1960s and will end the final day of 2020.
On Friday, the Germantown firm named for he and his wife, Kossman/ Klein & Co., is set to close permanently after 39 years in business. He and Juliet are the only employees. He notes business slowed considerably after the coronavirus pandemic emerged in March.
“We can’t get out and visit with people any longer,” said Klein, age 89. “If you ask to come out for a meeting they ask you, ‘Have you had a COVID test lately?’ I’m tired of what’s going on.’’
Even after the firm shuts down, Klein will continue as chairman of Germantown’s Economic Development Commission, a voluntary position he has held for most of the last two decades in the Memphis suburb of 40,000 population.
Nothing is unusual about closing a business. Plenty of stores and restaurants have been shuttered for lack of sales amid the pandemic. Klein, though, merits mention in the hometown newspaper. For one thing, his career traces a long arc of Memphis history. For another, he was, in a quiet way, ahead of his time.
Gig economy works in Memphis
Today, you can work from home, open a boutique business, learn to network, run lean hiring freelancers for special projects. This is so common it has a name -- the gig economy.
Before anyone had ever heard the term, and back when the security of employment at a major corporation was the aspiration for young Americans, Jerry ducked out of one of the city’s biggest corporations, Ned Cook’s E.C. Bruce Co. (inventor of Terminix pest control chemicals, where Klein was the ad manager, and Cook’s name would be enshrined on the Memphis Cook Convention Center).
Klein and Juliet opened an ad agency in the back bedroom of their Germantown home. Back then, buying the $27,000 house cost them dearly. When woods and fields separated Germantown and Memphis, they drove into the city to the nearest coin laundry, then on Poplar near Yates. They couldn’t afford a washer and dryer.
She did the books. He handled the clients. Rather than rent offices, they always worked from home. Over the years, he served as president of the Memphis Convention and Visitors Bureau and landed a wide array of clients in Memphis and the Delta. Clients included car dealer Bluff City Jaguar, freight biller Continental Traffic, commercial roofer John J. Campbell Co., Memphis Musicfest, the Shelby County Deputy Sheriff ’s Association and Memphis Belle Memorial Association.
Memphis Belle stoked dreams, career
Years earlier, he had actually sat in the cockpit of the Memphis Belle, the name painted on the side of a U.S. Army bomber returned from active service after World War II to great public
ity in America (for completing 25 bombing missions without being shot down).
Back then, his father sold clothes to retail stores in small cities for 100 miles around from his wholesale house on 2nd Street. Wholesalers such as Harris, Lapides and Memphis Cap Co. filled the street near The Peabody hotel. The young Klein could go from his father’s business, named Fashion Garment, pass Bry’s department store, (where an old plaque on the stairwell identified Bry’s employees who had served in World War I, including Joe Klein, his father) and find his way to the bomber parked on a landing strip.
No one guarded the four-engine airplane. He and a buddy clambered inside. A few years later, the Korean War began. A bored sophomore at Memphis State University, Klein enlisted in the U.S. Air Force. He served as a clerk at an air base in North Dakota, found his calling one long winter writing for the base newspaper. He loved the work.
Returning to Memphis after his enlistment expired, he hired on at E.C. Bruce, worked his way to Terminix ad manager, told his boss the pest control brand needed a national spokesman. Klein recommended Stan Freberg, then a well-known Hollywood comic. The trade journal Advertising Age years later would laud Freberg as one of the most influential admen of the 20th century, but back then he was best known for his spoof of Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” and taking aim at political correctness.
The boss told Klein to hire him. Klein phoned The Press-scimitar, a newspaper in Memphis, asked a business writer how to locate Freberg. The writer said pick up the phone, dial information in Hollywood, California, and ask the operator for Freberg’s number. He did.
Shortly after, Terminix signed the comedian, but Klein found himself restless with a single brand. He spoke to Deloss Walker, then on his way to becoming the dean of Memphis ad executives (Time magazine once labeled Walker the “ultimate media mesmerist”).
Walker & Associates hired him. Walker had a brilliant mind, yet struck many people as an ordinary man for the way he handled himself, a quality he saw in Klein -- capable but holding back. He once told Klein to push himself: “Don’t be afraid to go and talk to people. Pick up the telephone and call somebody. Always remember the guy you’re talking to puts on his pants the same way you do,’’ Klein remembered.
Klein liked the advice. In 1978, he joined Memphis Rotary, a civic group then numbering some 700 members, many of them corporate executives, business owners or doctors. A plastic surgeon urged him to become the group’s voluntary program chairman. It was the perfect networking opportunity. He met dozens of other members.
“I guess that became a defining moment in my life,” Klein said. “I know my business improved immediately.”
Entrepreneurship began with rejection
Klein worked hard, considered Walker a mentor, liked the busy agency, the money it brought in. He hoped to become a partner, a position that allowed a share in profits beyond the base salary. One day he sat down with Walker.
“I told him, ‘Deloss, I have to have something of my own. I’d like to own a piece of this,’ “Klein remembered, and recalled Walker’s reply: “I want this thing all for myself.”
Klein and Juliet mulled the future. They were already married. (They had met when she visited a party in Memphis hosted by a girlfriend, also from the Mississippi Delta). She understood entrepreneurs. Her brother, Chester Kossman, had owned Chester Kossman Buick Pontiac GMC of Clarksdale, and was known in Memphis, serving on the Methodist Healthcare Foundation board of directors.
“Julie and I looked at each other. We had no children. I wanted something of our own,’’ Klein remembered. He told Walker he would resign, pledged to never enroll Walker clients in the new firm, which was named Kossman/klein to take advantage of the Kossman name recognition in Memphis and the Delta.
He and Juliet opened in the back bedroom of the house in Germantown. She kept her full-time job as comptroller at the Memphis Jewish Federation. It was 1981. Her father advised him: when you move to a new town, get involved, give back, Klein recalled.
Forming civic capital in Germantown
Today giving back is called civic capital. It began for Klein in a Germantown grocery store. He was new in town. Shopping, he met a town official.
Klein started the Germantown Rotary and found himself appointed to the Germantown Design Review Commission. The Mcdonald’s controversy sprang up. The franchise owner wanted neon lights on the restaurant roof. Klein disapproved. The lights looked ugly. Most residents concurred.
“The culture of this community back in those days was we look at everything new with a jaundiced eye,’’ Klein said.
Germantown Mayor Sharon Goldsworthy liked Klein’s style. Where Walker saw a shy youth, Goldsworthy saw experience. He remembers she told him in 2000: “You’re in the advertising business. You know what goes on. I want you to be chairman of the EDC.”
Klein felt surprise. EDC was the Economic Development Commission, an area beyond his mettle. “It is in your hands if I screw up,’’ he recalls telling the mayor.
Klein pitched in. He figured the bedroom suburb had plenty of stores and restaurants by 2010, but needed startup businesses to help bring in people and tax base. He favored tech firms.
After the Border’s bookstore departed the Carrefour shopping center on Poplar, the EDC helped organize a tech business incubator under the auspices of Epicenter, the Greater Memphis Chamber spin-off set up in 2014 to help launch new entrepreneurs.
Despite the actions by a number of agencies, the incubator “floundered,” Klein said, singling out miscommunication between agencies as a culprit.
“We finally cut our ties and let it go,” Klein said. “That was a shame. Had we tried a little harder we could have made it a big success.”
Today, Klein remains focused on the need for housing in Germantown, particularly apartments for young families unable to afford smaller houses, now priced at over $300,000.
Although many in the town dislike more apartment buildings, Klein takes the longer view of an elder sage.
“If you don’t have progress what do you have?” Klein said. “You can have progress as long as it’s done properly.’’
Ted Evanoff, business columnist of The Commercial Appeal, can be reached at evanoff@commercialappeal.com and (901) 529-2292.