Advertising exec. transplanted his ‘city business’ to the Berkshires. Their Fund at The Trust supports children and older adults.
Edith Kramer Klein (1916-2008)
Jules L. Klein (1913-2011)
Advertising executive Jules Klein and his business partner could have been the prototypes for working remotely. In October 1949, The Berkshire County Eagle featured a story and photo of Jules and Stuart Sande working at a patio table next to swimming pool in “their outdoor conference room.”
The article explained that Sande and Klein both felt “they are pioneering something new by bringing a ‘city business’ into the country.”
“Clients, literally beating a path to their door from New York and Philadelphia, come equipped with their bathing suits and contracts in their briefcases,” The Eagle reported. And in a time before computers and the internet, Jules, who had learned to fly under the GI Bill after World War II, used his airplane to deliver the finished products. “What limitations we may have as a small agency are more than offset by flying our services to clients as soon as they need them,” he told The Eagle.
Jules L. Klein was born in Manhattan to Solomon and Sarah Gold Klein. He began working in public relations in 1934 and graduated from New York University in 1936 with a degree in advertising. He worked at major New York firms until joining the armed forces, where he served for five years.
In 1948, Jules and Sande, a former ad world colleague, joined forces in Berkshire County, Massachusetts. Jules wrote the copy and did the soliciting, and Stuart did most of the artwork and layouts. One of their first successful collaborations of the Sande-Klein Advertising Agency was winning a contract for a 26-week Berkshire Life Insurance campaign that appeared in The Eagle. It was so successful that insurance companies nationwide wrote in for reprints, and the agency won the contract for all Berkshire Life advertising.
In 1949, Jules began volunteering with the Pittsfield (Massachusetts) Community Chest as publicity director, where he designed campaign brochures and a publicity workshop featuring experienced news advertising and public relations speakers. He pitched the publicity committee the idea of a mascot—to represent a good neighbor in the community—with a double P and a feather in notices about The Chest.
Two years later, he opened his own agency—Jules L. Klein, Advertising—in Pittsfield. In 1952, he married the former Edith Gutwillig in Manhattan, where he maintained an apartment. Edith was the daughter of Charles and Mary Feinberg Kramer of Kew Gardens. She was born in Austria in 1919 and had been married once before. An article about their wedding described her as a salary administrator. In business directories published after their wedding, she was listed as “treasurer-president of Jules L. Klein, Advertising.”
Jules represented many national and regional consumer and industrial firms in New England, including Columbia Bicycle, Eaton Paper, and Milton Bradley Company’s education division. His firm relocated to Springfield in 1960. By that time, advertising in the United States was exploding—with about 5,000 firms handling more than $10 billion in accounts.
In 1973, his firm became a division of Barlow/Johnson Inc., an advertising and public relations firm with offices in Syracuse, Albany, Buffalo, and New York. Jules continued to serve as president of the Klein New England Division and as senior vice president of Barlow/Johnson.
In the early 1990s, Stuart and Edith moved to Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Edith died in 2008, and Jules died in 2011.
Their fund at The Trust benefits children and older adults. Grant recipients have included LiveOn NY, INCLUDEnyc, and the Internationals Network for Public Schools.