Pendleton Dudley

Pendleton Dudley (September 8, 1876 – December 10, 1966) was an American journalist and public relations executive. Once considered the "dean of public relations", he is best known as the long-time outside publicity counsel to AT&T and as a founder of the predecessor organizations to the Public Relations Society of America and the Institute for Public Relations. He was the father of the choreographer Jane Dudley and composer Margaret Purcell, and was the husband of the motorist Hermine Jahns.

Early life and education Dudley was born in Troy, Missouri, to Peter Dudley and Cornelia Dudley (née Pendleton). The Dudleys had come to Missouri from Kentucky by wagon a few years before the younger Dudley's birth. Peter Dudley operated a general store in Troy. Pendleton Dudley attended Mexico High School in Mexico, Missouri, for two years before he had to drop-out to assist with the family store due to his father's ill health.

Dudley began working as a part-time reporter and typesetter for the weekly Troy Free Press while still employed at the family store. This eventually led to a job at The Mexico Ledger. In 1898, inspired by an article he had read in the Saturday Evening Post titled "Working Your Way Through College", Dudley began putting-away a portion of his earnings to attend university. In 1899, having saved $100, he moved to New York City and enrolled at Columbia University, graduating in 1906. During his time at Columbia he contributed to the campus humor magazine Jester of Columbia.

One of Dudley's first large accounts was AT&T, a client he would keep until his death in 1966. Following World War II, it was revealed Dudley had worked as a middle-man to funnel payments from DeWitt Wallace to Lawrence Dennis; Wallace had hired Dennis to write "smear pieces" against Henry A. Wallace for Reader's Digest.

In the 1940s, Dudley brought two former newspaper editors on to his firm as partners, changing the company's name to Dudley-Anderson-Yutzy. With his wife he had a second daughter, Margaret. For a five-year period after they founded Reader's Digest, DeWitt Wallace and Lila Bell Wallace rented and lived in a cottage on Dudley's Pleasantville, New York property, having responded to a newspaper ad Dudley had taken out.

In retirement, Dudley lived at his home in Pleasantville and maintained ownership of his firm. In 1965, a year before his death, he moved to the University Club of New York.

He had three siblings.

In 1957 Dudley endowed the Pendleton Dudley Scholarship at Macalester College in response to a scholarship fundraising drive undertaken by Dewitt Wallace. It is annually awarded to "an unusually talented young man who aspires to be a teacher."