Robert E. Hillard; Co-Founded Nation’s Largest PR Firm

Robert E. Hillard, 83, who co-founded Fleishman-Hillard, which became the country’s largest public relations firm and the fifth largest in the world. Hillard had studied “this thing called public relations, which no one knew anything about” while a student at USC. Alfred Fleishman had been a public information officer in the military during World War II. Soon after meeting, they opened their first office above a Woolworth drugstore in St. Louis in 1946. Their first big client was the scandal-plagued Union Electric Co. The utility’s president and chairman, J. Wesley McAfee, gave Hillard lasting advice. “He said, ‘Honesty is the best policy; I know, I’ve tried both ways.’ So we decided that in the long run, tell the truth. Otherwise,” Hillard said, “you’ll always be trying to squeeze out of something.” Hillard, a native of St. Paul, Minn., graduated with a journalism degree from the University of Minnesota. His death came just two weeks after the death of his second wife, Nancy Oxenhandler Lowe, a retired psychologist who specialized in treating children. Although retired since 1982, he remained a PR man to end, trying to pitch a story idea about his hospice nurse to a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter. On Wednesday in Caledonia, Mo., of emphysema.