Bill Rukeyser, 1939-2022
Of all maverick publisher Chris Whittle’s celebrity hires in the late 1980s, he may have been the most surprising, not that Whittle would have offered Bill Rukeyser a job here, but that the powerful editor would have taken it, moving from a high-profile career in business and financial journalism in New York to take a job with a famously unpredictable company down in Knoxville. The tall Princeton alumnus with a deep voice and formal bearing was a Wall Street Journal reporter before he found a place at Time, Inc., as managing editor of Fortune magazine, and later as founding editor of Money magazine. He arrived at Whittle in 1988, just as the company was planning its palatial downtown headquarters. First working on the top floor of the Andrew Johnson Building, Rukeyser was best known here for helming Whittle’s prestige project, Whittle Books, a series of short but substantial works by major thinkers of the day, including George Plimpton, Gary Wills, and John Kenneth Galbraith. The company crashed by degrees in the mid-1990s, “overextended,” as many assessed it, at a time when the company was venturing into unconventional television projects and a quixotic plan to overhaul America’s public school system by challenging it with a private model called Edison Schools.
Even more surprising than this publishing titan’s arrival was the fact that Rukeyser, unlike most of the other honchos including Whittle himself, stayed in Knoxville. While here, Bill Rukeyser created a glossy niche publication, Corporate Board Member magazine, which he created and edited from his office high in Plaza Tower. It had an exclusive audience of 60,000 subscribers, all board members of public corporations (“60,000 very interesting people,” he remarked). His Knoxville-based Bill Rukeyser, Inc., was also involved in other forward-thinking projects, like online auctions.
But after landing here, he and his English-born wife Elisabeth looked around with an open mind and got involved in a broad spectrum of worthwhile community efforts, including UT Medical Center, of which Rukeyser was chairman of the board; Knoxville Museum of Art, of which he also served as a director; and the Knoxville Jazz Orchestra, of which he was a major benefactor, and one of its most regular attendees. Despite his button-down demeanor, he loved jazz, and was impressed with what Knoxville had to offer, especially through UT’s jazz program.
His preference for Knoxville first puzzled his colleagues in New York, but he explained it by citing its beauty—from his high office he could see “the mist rising off the river and the mountains in the distance”—and the city’s unusual openness to newcomers and new ideas. He and Elisabeth lived in Rocky Hill and convinced his old urban neighbors that life in Knoxville was “an acceptable eccentricity.”
He was a regular reader of Metro Pulse, and when it was terminated, he joined the cadre of people who attempted to revive its spirit via the Knoxville History Project. He was one of our first supporters, and served on our original board of directors. Thanks to his corporate-board member experience, he was the primary author of our original nonprofit bylaws (and patiently explained to me why we couldn’t just skip that part), and an important advisor on the complicated financial aspects of founding a nonprofit.
Although his chief interest in KHP was its support for our major journalism venture, the award-winning but short-lived Knoxville Mercury, he has remained a valued advisor in the five years since it closed. In early July, he helped us more accurately remember some details concerning the Whittle paragraphs in our new “Walking Literary Guide.”
In Knoxville he remained a formal New Yorker of another era, always in a dark suit, always with a bon mot worthy of Thurber. He loved humor, and always seemed to be restraining a pun, but somehow, I believe, got Knoxville to take itself more seriously as a worthwhile project.
Following his own wishes, no funeral is planned, and there’s been little public notice of his passing in the media—as of this writing, Wikipedia still refers to him in the present tense—but we can’t help remembering him, and finding inspiration in his example.
~ Jack Neely
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