OBITUARY | Thomas Shepard Jr.

Thomas Rockwall Shepard Jr., 96, of Longboat Key, died April 29.

Born Aug. 22, 1918, Mr. Shepard grew up in East Orange, N.J., during the Great Depression and graduated from East Orange High School, where he was president of his senior class. In 1940, he graduated from Amherst College, which he attended on scholarship and where he waited tables for spending money. 

After graduation, Mr. Shepard applied for the competitive Vick School of Applied Merchandising in New York, an executive marketing training program created by the Vick Chemical Co. He was one of three graduates in 1941, by then having been a traveling salesman of Vick’s VapoRub to small town country stores. Recounting the experience in letters to his fiancée, Nancy Kruidenier, he described Texas as being filled with “bogs, bugs, mules, wild dogs and the ever present danger of rattlers and bulls.”

He married Kruidenier in September of that year. The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor three months later, Mr. Shepard went to New York’s Navy headquarters and volunteered to serve. He was commissioned as an ensign and eventually assigned to Destroyer Escort 419, the USS Robert F. Keller, as gunnery officer. He was involved in six major campaigns in the Western Pacific in 1944 and 1945, including Iwo Jima and Okinawa. At the end of his service, he was the Keller’s executive officer and held the rank of lieutenant commander. 

At a career crossroads after almost five years of U.S. Navy service in the Western Pacific, Mr. Shepard considered both Harvard Business School and Look magazine’s training program. Mike Cowles, the founder and publisher of Look, convinced him he would receive a better business education by joining Look. 

Mr. Shepard launched a 26-year career that included stops in Boston and Los Angeles before landing in New York in 1949. He rose from salesman to advertising sales manager to director of advertising before being named Look’s publisher in 1965. 

When Look closed in 1971, Mr. Shepard made sure everyone on his sales team had new employment. He then joined the Institute of Outdoor Advertising as president, a job he held until 1976. 

Mr. Shepard was passionate about national politics and international news. In the early 1990s, Mr. Shepard chaired George H. W. Bush’s presidential campaign in Connecticut. 

A staunch lifelong devotion to the Republican Party ended a decade later when Mr. Shepard began to prefer more moderate Democratic candidates. 

Mr. Shepard also enjoyed writing. His final book of four, “Making the Sale: The Art of Salesmanship,” was published last year. 

Mr. Shepard is survived by his wife, Nancy; three daughters, Sue Shepard Jaques, of Lambertville, N.J., Molly Shepard Dickinson, of Philadelphia, and Amy Shepard Knight, of Chevy Chase, Md.; son, Thomas R. (Rocky) Shepard III, of Rye, N.Y.; nine grandchildren; and 12 great-grandchildren. 

Funeral services will be private.