Ted Earl, Marketing’s colourful editor for the two decades between 1952 and 1972, died on Jan. 2. He was 92.
I met him once, nine years ago at a reception at the Art Gallery of Ontario to mark Marketing’s 90th anniversary. We’d invited him and all other former staff we could track down, not really expecting him to attend. He had to be almost 84 then. But he showed up-took the subway-sportily dressed in a cravat and preppy suit jacket, tall and handsome and totally on his game. He was sharp, witty and funny. I asked when he started at Marketing. “Well, I got out of the Navy in January 1946…” he began, and off he went with a parade of reminiscences and stories.
“He loved the speechifying and was good on his feet,” recalls Colin Muncie, who worked under Earl during the 1960s and succeeded him as editor in 1973.
Earl was, in Muncie’s words, the “front man for the publication” during one of Canadian advertising’s most colourful eras, a high profile personality who could hold his own with the larger than life personalities of the time-people like George Sinclair (a MacLaren exec who was also broadcaster Gordon’s brother), Warren Reynolds, Bryan Vaughn, Harry “Red” Foster, Trevor Goodman, Jimmy Lovick and Jerry Goodis.
Ted Wilson, a sales rep on Marketing in the 60s and later its publisher, remembers Earl always took “great pains” to set an appropriately stylish image. But he took the job seriously.
Earl took special pride in ensuring that the magazine had an editorial voice that was-and was seen to be-autonomous from its owner Maclean-Hunter Publishing, which purchased Marketing from its longtime independent owners in 1954, two years after he became editor. (MH, then the country’s largest trade and consumer magazine publisher, was bought by Rogers Communications in 1994.) Wilson says legend had it Earl decreed that no MH business executive other than the magazine’s own publisher was to be allowed to set foot in Marketing’s editorial offices in the early years, lest they try to influence the content (a fear that apparently wasn’t always unfounded).
“In the early days at Maclean-Hunter, everybody (great coveys of them, anyway) said Marketing would become a house organ for Maclean-Hunter. Even some of the people at Maclean-Hunter thought it would, too. It never did,” Earl wrote in an article published in Stimulus magazine shortly after his departure from the editor’s chair.
“Maclean-Hunter-or some of the people at MH-felt that I leaned over backward to favour other publishing houses. Southam Business Press felt I favoured Maclean-Hunter. Broadcasters felt I favoured print. Print felt I favoured broadcasters. So far as I was concerned, I never leaned at all: It was a taut tightrope to walk. I walked it.”
When it came time to step off the tightrope, Earl did it with flair. The early 1973 article in Stimulus-effectively a competitor to Marketing-not-so-subtly confirmed that his departure wasn’t entirely voluntary (“It’s the clich situation: ‘Let’s agree to disagree and part as friends…’ “). And it was accompanied by a photograph of Earl, naked save for shoes and socks, lying on his belly on a rug at his typewriter with a single long stemmed rose set beside it. The gesture was taken as a parting shot at conservative executives within MH.
The Toronto-born Earl worked in newspapers, radio and advertising prior to enlisting in the Canadian Navy during the Second World War. He returned to the Toronto ad agency he’d worked at before the war, McConnell Eastman, as a copywriter, earning $1,500. When Marketing advertised an associate editor job paying $2,500 annually, Earl jumped at it.
As an editor, Earl would hire very good people and let them do their jobs, says Muncie, who described him as “the nicest guy” to work for.
He particularly liked to hire British expats, Muncie says. In the late 1960s two of those expats, Jim Ferrier and Doug Vickers, returned to England to launch a magazine based on Marketing’s model. The publication, which debuted in 1968, was called Campaign, and Ferrier went on to become its editor and later its publisher, Muncie says.
After his departure from Marketing, Earl retired, says his son Britt of Belleville, Ont., one of three children raised by Ted and Marjorie, his wife of more than 60 years. In recent years both Ted and Marjorie Earl had been living in the Veterans wing of Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital. Marjorie died in February 2005. Despite his age, Ted’s passing came as something of a surprise, says Britt. He was still in good health and would regularly get out and about and was definitely still very much a dapper “clothes horse.”
“Ted always had a most inquisitive mind and always delighted in learning new things,” read the death notice appearing Jan. 6. “At age 90 he learned to use a computer and became Internet savvy. Always an interesting storyteller with a great sense of humour. He loved his family, friends and duplicate bridge outings.”
