Robert S. Keefe

Bob (left) remains an advocate of conventional dress and usually wears his paisley tie with this shirt.

After W&L Bob spent a year on a fellowship at Vanderbilt, where he lived in a garage, drove a Ford Falcon and bought a used television set that luckily cost the exact amount of his book stipend, in order not to miss “Laugh-In” on Monday nights.

In 1970 W&L hired him as its public relations director. Ten years later his Ring-tum Phi pal Larry Honig, ’70, brought him into the marketing arm of McKinsey & Company, the management consulting firm, where Larry was an influential partner.

Ever since, Bob has worked in an infinitesimally narrow niche of the marketing game: teaching mid-career people in professional services firms, all of whom believe they have nothing left to learn, how to write persuasively. (Successful business writing, he says, is the miracle of conveying an insight, without distortion, from one brain into another.) After McKinsey he worked briefly at Deloitte and, since 1989, has practiced on his own from an office in New York City’s Financial District. When he retires, his profession will disappear.

As editor of this newsletter, Bob has been unendingly amazed and abashed by the worthiness of his classmates: the sheer magnitude of your personal and professional accomplishments ... your steadfastness and moral uprightness ... and especially the W&L-nurtured commitment to integrity and honor, which you always mention and seem always to live by. He admires and envies you. And that’s no jabberwock.