To Whom It May Concern--
Starting in 1971, W. S. Adamson and Associates became the first Associate Office of the national public relations firm of Hil1 & Knowlton of New York, and continued that relationship through the year 1994. WSA handled a series of challenging assignments in Salt Lake and throughout the Western Region for the New York firm.
During that period I was the director of the Associates Program at H&K and was responsible for obtaining services for our clients outside New York City. One fact stood out in every assignment that WSA undertook for us: a quality of service, reliability in meeting deadlines, and a very high level of professionalism.
Here are some of the projects that were handled by WSA, which I recall almost 20 years after making the assignments:
The 1982 1ocal management of the Trailblazer Pipeline System national press conference and dedication ceremony of the 800-mile natural gas pipeline from Whitney Canyon, Wyoming to Beatrice, Nebraska. This was a very complex program handled for our Chicago office. There was a consortium of five companies, 250 corporate officials, a press corps that included 26 local regional, trade and national print and electronic media; the site was located 185 miles from Salt Lake; a bus caravan of six units to the site was organized, and a big banquet for corporate officials and their partners held in Salt Lake City.
Then there was the NewVector cut-in ceremony to introduce Utah to the then-new cell phone technology in 1984. Similar events were coordinated in Minneapolis, Chicago, Phoenix, Denver and Seattle. But the WSA organized event was the most successful since the Utah governor participated by placing a call from his car at the site to his nephew who was on assignment in Rio de Janeiro.
Many assignments were carried out by WSA for Kraft Foods and other accounts such as Continental Baking Company, Haagen-Dazs and many of H&K's Fortune 500 clients. As I recall, assignments originated from our offices in New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, St. Louis, Denver and Seattle.
And, believe it or not, one emergency assignment was for gathering media and law enforcement information regarding a pre-dawn sniper shooting of an Allied Van Lines truck traveling through a canyon near Ogden, Utah (this was a long time ago.)
In those days H&K relied on WSA, and Bruce Whitehead was there then. The good news is that he is there now, too, to manage client work.
Prepared by Robert J. Stone, former director, H&K Associates Group, as described above.
