John Blair & Co. - John Leo Blair - 1969 dated Stock Certificate

Stock Certificate of the Famous Company that John Leo Blair built. John Leo Blair (1888–1962) was an American entrepreneur. He established the New Process Company, which is now referred to as Blair Corporation – a direct marketing retail firm. Additionally, he was an author, inventor, a trailblazer in direct marketing, and served as an advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. Numerous letters and notes are preserved in company archives, including correspondence from Franklin D. Roosevelt, several from Henry Morgenthau, Jr., and others from Charles Merrill of Merrill & Lynch, as well as Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson (a close friend of Blair) and others to substantiate this entry.

Blair achieved considerable success at a relatively young age. He journeyed across the globe before the advent of air travel. He had the opportunity to meet Popes Pius XI and Pius XII and maintained a long-standing friendship with Cardinal Francis Spellman. Blair played a crucial role in revitalizing the economy during the Great Depression, and his company has created employment for thousands of associates while providing billions of quality, affordable products to millions of Americans.

John L. Blair was seemingly motivated, in part, by an interest in the human mind and its driving forces. For several years, Robert Collier, the renowned author of early self-help literature, collaborated closely with John Blair to develop sales techniques and effective copywriting. Collier noted that John Blair "appeared to intuitively understand what takes most of us many years to grasp, namely that regardless of what we have to sell, it is not products that we are marketing, but rather human nature and human responses."