End of an Era: Veteran list broker Ed Proctor dies at 90

Direct marketing lost one of its grand veterans on March 4 when Ed Proctor, who retired from the Guild Co. only last year after 68 years as a list broker, died at age 90.

Proctor, whose career spanned the Addressograph and computer eras, brokered lists for scores of mailers, including Newsweek, Walter Drake, Figi’s, Foster & Gallagher, Miles Kimball and Meredith. In an interview in 1996, the late Tom Foster described Proctor and his onetime assistant Fanny Simms as “two of the most legitimate people I ever met in the list business.”

“He was a wonderful gentleman,” said Hal Roberson, president of Guild Co. and Mail Marketing Inc. “He represented a different era, exemplified by character, honesty, loyalty and integrity.”

A tall, thin man with a wry sense of humor, Edward Walcott Proctor Jr. was born in 1909 and grew up in Teaneck, NJ. His father, Edward, was a list broker and general manager for Guild Co. – a list firm founded in 1899 by Charles Howard Guild – and acquired the company after Guild’s death in 1920 (see Directions, January).

After attending the Hackley boarding school in Tarrytown, NY, Proctor attended Cornell University and planned a career in journalism. But at the height of the Depression in 1931, his father told him he had to leave school and come work for the company.

Proctor immersed himself in the list business, and soon was attending clients like Davis Paint Co. of Kansas City, and American Products of Cincinnati. Lists sometimes rented for as little as $3, and “there was less cheating because there were less people to cheat,” Proctor once joked.

Part of his job was convincing such companies to put their own lists up for rental, and to use Guild as exclusive broker of the list. “In those days, customers’ names were coveted,” he said in an interview in 1995. “Mailers thought they were the only person in the world with that particular name.”

After joining the Navy as an ensign in 1942, Proctor served on a destroyer in the South Pacific. In July 1945, while recovering in a naval hospital from an eye infection, he learned of his father’s death. Soon he was back home running Guild Co., which had suffered during the war years. Thanks to the postwar boom and Proctor’s 18-hour work days, Guild Co. soon turned around. Proctor brokered massive list orders for Newsweek, McCall’s and Redbook.

In 1951 he was visited by Tom Foster, who had recently started the firm later known as Foster & Gallagher and wanted to put his list on the market. “[Proctor] was tall and lean, and even when it was 98 degrees he would have a three-piece suit on,” remembered Foster.

The same year, Proctor moved his office from New York to Englewood, NJ, making Guild Co. the first list firm to move to the suburbs. “People thought I was crazy for moving,” he laughed.

Proctor sold the business to Bob Dale in the early 1970s, although he continued to run it. In 1975 the firm was acquired by Wayne Willereth. It is located in Haworth, NJ.

Although he officially retired in 1979, Proctor continued working a few days a week at Guild, brokering clients like Walter Drake. Illness forced him to stop working last year. Friends fondly remembered that to the very end Proctor told the story of William Stroh, who left Guild’s Chicago office in the 1930s to start his own firm.

Proctor is survived by his wife Mary; his son Edward W. Proctor III; his daughter Talley Wright; and several grandchildren.