Alan Holliday, at 72; cofounded venerable ad agency, taught at BU

ALAN HOLLIDAY

Twenty years after lending his name to the masthead and his irrepressible spirit to the founding of Hill, Holliday, Connors and Cosmopulos, the venerable Boston advertising firm, Alan Holliday hadn't lost a step when he burst into classrooms at Boston University to train new generations of creative minds.

"He had this sort of wry demeanor and was this little bundle of energy," said Tobe Berkovitz, associate dean at BU's College of Communication. "There was just a joie de vivre; there's no other way to describe it. My typical view of Alan was of him scampering down the hall with an armload of advertising story boards. Here would be Alan, who was not a tall guy, with these giant story boards, heading off to class."

Mr. Holliday, who at one point juggled advertising and graduate work so he could earn a master's in theology from Harvard Divinity School, died of pulmonary failure Monday at Massachusetts General Hospital. He was 72 and lived in Hingham.

"Alan was very bright and a very strategic thinker, but he also had kind of a 'gee whiz' quality to his life," said Jack Connors, who cofounded Hill Holliday. "Everything was more than half full; he was a complete and total optimist."

In the verbal shorthand for firms with multiple names, the ad agency they cofounded became known through the years as simply Hill Holliday, but Mr. Holliday left several months after launching the company in 1968 with Connors, George Hill, and Stavros Cosmopulos.

Already a veteran of advertising firms in New York City, he had found himself handling business details he was "clueless" about, Mr. Holliday told Advertising Age magazine in 1998. So he left and worked for other agencies in Boston, among them Quinn & Johnson and Arnold & Co.

The quest to find his correct place in the community included satisfying an interest in religion and business ethics by studying at Harvard Divinity School, beginning in 1980. With a family to support, he went to school while still working in advertising.

"We talk about it being the nicest midlife crisis you can have," said his daughter, Sarah Holliday Weiss of Ypsilanti, Mich. "He didn't go out and buy a convertible."

That's not to say Mr. Holliday paid no attention to what he drove. Over the years, he had Volkswagen Beetles, a Karmann Ghia, and a Fiat Spider.

"He tried to make the commute into Boston fun," his daughter said. "And for a while he had a little pickup truck. He didn't really need a pickup truck, but it was fun to have it."

After getting his theology degree, Mr. Holliday considered various options and settled on teaching at Boston University, where "for almost a decade, Alan was one of the driving creative forces of the advertising program," said Berkovitz, who teaches advertising at BU.

For many years, Mr. Holliday also was a faculty adviser for AdLab, an advertising agency operated by BU students.

"What he brought to the classroom was this incredible knowledge and skill and experience from the world of advertising, and he knew how to convert that into an educational experience for the students," Berkovitz said. "There'd always be this line of students outside his office going in to talk about their work, or looking for advice on how to get into the field. He was a mentor to so many students."

Said Weiss: "He could really influence the next generation of ad executives to not just go for the bottom line, but to do something with a higher calling."

Connors recalled seeing an inscription at a grave in Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain that brought to mind his former partner.

"It said, 'He went about doing good.' That was Alan Holliday," Connors said. "It just strikes me that that's the story of Alan Holliday's life."

An only child whose parents were the only children in their respective families, Alan Craft Holliday was born in Cleveland and grew up west of the city in Bay Village, Ohio.

He received a bachelor's in history from Kenyon College and after graduating married Lucile Johnson, who had attended nearby Denison University.

He served in the Army Reserve and began his advertising career in New York City. While working for Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn - known as BBDO - he was transferred to the worldwide ad agency's Boston office, where he met the three men with whom he founded Hill Holliday.

"When you work in a satellite office, all your creative [work] had to be approved in New York," Mr. Holliday told the Globe in 1998, recalling one reason they opened their own shop.

For Mr. Holliday, creativity didn't stop when went home. Known for wit and wordplay, he entertained his children by making up words, doodling cartoons, and creating sound effects. His expansive knowledge of words, language, and popular culture turned him into a handy resource.

"When my brother Tom was at college, he called him the human thesaurus," Weiss said. "He would call Dad and say, 'What's another word for . . . ? Or, 'How do I finish this sentence?' "

Sometimes, Mr. Holliday took his children to the office, where it was entertainment enough simply to watch him type, a skill he mastered in a clerical position with the Army Reserve.

"He could fly on the keyboard, and that was when they had manual typewriters," his daughter said. "It was just like magic; he'd fill a page in seconds."

A clarinetist who had played in bands while growing up, Mr. Holliday was a connoisseur of music, particularly jazz.

"He has the most CDs I have ever seen," his daughter said of his collection. "It's thousands of CDs."

"He just knew everything about jazz," Berkovitz said. "He had every album, every cassette, every CD. He was like the Wikipedia of jazz. You'd go to the Regattabar at the Charles Hotel with Alan and it was like seeing someone go to heaven. He had seen all these guys dozens of times and knew everyone. It was part of his artistic aesthetic, and it contributed to his sensibility as someone who was creative."

In addition to his wife and daughter, Mr. Holliday leaves two sons, Daniel of Portland, Maine, and Thompson of Hingham; three granddaughters; and two grandsons.

A memorial service will be held at 2:30 p.m. Saturday in St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Church in Hingham.