William JeanesThe Road to Pickletown: A Southerner Confronts Cowbells, Clowns, Cuba, Christmas, and Mississippi
WILLIAM JEANES For more than three decades, William Jeanes was a major figure in automotive journalism. He began as a freelancer in the 1970s, became a staff writer at Car and Driver, and after a ten-year career in the advertising agency business, he accepted the position of editor-in-chief at Car and Driver. Under his leadership, the magazine became the world's largest automotive publication, with annual revenues of $100 million. In 1993, he became a senior vice president and group publisher at Hachette Magazines and was made publisher of both Car and Driver and Road & Track as well as a group of smaller magazines. The two large magazines' annual revenue was $160 million. His ten-year advertising career included service as a senior vice president at two major agencies, SSC&B: Lintas and J. Walter Thompson. At JWT he was director of the Ford Division account, in which capacity he oversaw $150 million in advertising expenditures (1985 dollars). A 1959 graduate of Millsaps College, his undergraduate activities included membership in Pi Kappa Alpha, work with the Millsaps Players, and one season of varsity baseball. In 1992, he was named the Millsaps College Alumnus of the Year and was named to the Board of Trustees two years later. In 2008, he became a Life Trustee. In 2010, he received the Livesay Award for service to Millsaps College. He served as an adjunct professor of English at Millsaps in 1983, and in 2005 was writer-in-residence at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. He has lectured at the University of Tennessee School of Business, the University of Michigan Engineering School, the University of Mississippi, and the University of Texas. In 2008, he presented a lecture "Mississippi's Combat Airmen of World War I" as a part of the Millsaps Arts & Lecture series. His writing has been published in a score of the world's automotive publications as well as in Sports Illustrated, Parade, Playboy, American Heritage, Consumer Digest, the New York Times, and AARP The Magazine. His scholarly writing and reviews have been published in the Journal of Mississippi History; War, Literature and the Arts; The Journal of World War I Aviation Historians, and others. He served forty-three months on active duty with the United States Navy, mostly aboard the aircraft carrier USS Intrepid. He became Senior Watch Officer on the Intrepid and left the service with the rank of lieutenant. He lives in Ridgeland with his wife, Susan. He is retired but writes occasionally for the Northside Sun and served until 2017 on the board of the Eudora Welty Foundation.
