IVY LEE announces the formation of the firm of IVY LEE and T. J. ROSS 15 Broad Street, New York
To Big Business and the Press last week went chastely printed cards with the above announcement. The cards did not state what business Messrs. Lee & Ross were engaged in, but it is unlikely that anyone had to ask. Every big businessman, every news editor and a good portion of the public have long been thoroughly aware of Ivy Ledbetter Lee as the highest priced pressagent in the land, the suave representative (at one time or another) of Schwab, Chrysler, the Armours, Harvard University, Princeton, Thompson-Starrett Co., Portland Cement, the Guggenheims, the Red Cross, the Republic of Poland, New York's Interborough subway, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the Waldorf-Astoria and—longest and most notably—the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Rockefellers.
Not so well known as Ivy Lee is able Thomas Joseph Ross, Jr., 39. Fourteen years ago he quit the New York Sun, on which he had been a steady-going "wheelhorse" reporter of the Frank Ward O'Malley period, to work for Publicist Lee. Not only did he rise to No. 1 man on the Lee staff, devoting most of his time to Pennsylvania Railroad and Chrysler, but he became a private relations counsel between his temperamental chief and the rest of the staff. When Mr. Lee would abruptly summon his staff to meet him in his uptown suite in the old Waldorf, demand to know why a certain letter had not been sent out as directed, then brokenly announce: "I'm through. I simply can't go on. You fellows divide up the accounts!" —it was Tommy Ross who quietly herded the office force back to work.
One day last fortnight appeared reasonable evidence that Ivy Lee, 56 and a millionaire, really considered retiring. A chosen few of the staff were called into their boss's elaborate, book-filled office.
While Mr. Lee looked on benignly, Chief-of-Staff Ross announced that henceforth he was a senior partner. Moreover, the rest of them were appointed junior partners : Burnham Carter, who joined the firm ten years ago and lately returned from a leave of absence in which he was secretary to Ambassador Guggenheim in Havana; Harcourt Parrish, oldtime AP and Louisville Courier-Journal man whom Ivy Lee rented out to Banker Melvin Alvah Traylor for the latter's effort to get the Democratic nomination last year; Joseph Ripley, onetime editor of the tradepaper American Press in which he wrote a flattering interview with Mr. Lee in 1926; James Wideman Lee II, 26, elder son, who has been working for his father since graduation from Princeton four years ago (absent last week in Europe); and Ivy Ledbetter Lee Jr., 24, graduated from Princeton last year.
Physician v. Poison. A writer in the New York Herald Tribune once called Ivy