John Leo Blair
He was also an author, inventor,[1] a pioneer in direct marketing, and an advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and to Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jr. Several letters and notes exist in company archives, including a letter from Franklin D. Roosevelt, a few from Henry Morgenthau Jr., and others from Charles Merrill of Merrill & Lynch, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson (one of Blair's very close friends) and others to support this entry.
For several years, Robert Collier, the famous author of early self-help books, worked closely with John Blair in developing sales methods and effective copy writing.
His mother sent John out to play and the curious lad, seeing a shiny object in a fountain, leaned in to retrieve it, losing his balance.
"[6][7] In 1910, during his second year at the university, John L. Blair received an offer from a classmate to sell raincoats during his Easter vacation trip back home, by train.
After making about fifty unsuccessful sales calls, and now just one small community from home, Blair was asked by an undertaker if he had an attractive, professional-looking black raincoat.
With the help of his father and siblings, John mailed 10,000 letters to undertakers across America and the coat quickly saturated the market.
In a last-ditch effort, on the very last day of that year, the top six officers pitched in about $100,000 of their own money to stabilize the bottom line.
John Blair was by now a very good friend and law practice client of Robert H. Jackson, a fellow native of Warren County, PA, and a Jamestown, NY lawyer (who in the 1940s would become Attorney General of the U.S., a U.S. Supreme Court Justice and U.S. Chief Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trial).
John L. Blair continued to pursue his law career while serving as president of his new-found company.
It was because of his law career that he met and became good friends with Jackson, and through Jackson, Blair met Franklin D. Roosevelt and Henry Morgenthau Jr. Blair provided Roosevelt with ideas during his run for the presidency, based on what John had learned about selling, and human nature, as he built his million-dollar empire.
Once Roosevelt was elected, John L. Blair was invited to Washington, DC, to confer with Henry Morgenthau Jr. on how the nation's economy could be rescued.
For instance, at one point, one in every twenty Americans received advertising mailer from New Process Company, all with John L. Blair's handsome face and signature on them.
In the middle of a cold November night, John L. Blair climbed a fireman's ladder with axe in hand to break out upper floor windows so that the water from the fire hoses could reach inside.
On one of his many trips overseas, John Blair met then-Monsignor Francis ("Frank") Spellman, a Catholic priest from New York who would one day become arguably America's most famous Cardinal.
