In December 1991, Jack Sansolo achieved a measure of national fame when he was featured on the cover of Fortune magazine next to the headline: “Gay in Corporate America.”
As the president of the prominent Boston advertising firm Hill, Holliday, he had been out for years — so long that in the magazine interview, he wondered why “corporations are so nervous about things that don’t matter.”
Nine years later he was asking a different question. “Clearly there are a lot of gay people” in senior roles at many companies, Mr. Sansolo told The New York Times, “but you still don’t see a lot of them coming out.”
Having personally forged paths to being publicly LGBTQ in corporate life, he wondered why more hadn’t followed. “You would have expected it to have happened, but it hasn’t,” he said in the 2000 Times interview. “I wish I knew why.”
An advertising executive and consultant whose leadership contributed to Hill, Holliday’s rise during the 1980s, Mr. Sansolo had lived in Boston, Cambridge, and on the West Coast since leaving the agency in 1993. He was 81 and living in Los Angeles when he died of cancer on Oct. 2.
At Hill, Holliday, where he worked for about 10 years, he was known as Dr. Jack — partly because he had a doctorate in social psychology from Harvard University, and also to distinguish him from Jack Connors, a founder of the firm.
“As anyone will tell you, Dr. Jack was brilliant,” said Julie DeSisto Joyce, a longtime executive assistant to Connors, who died in July.
“He was thoughtful and he had such a great way of gathering all the information and looking at it from all different angles,” she said.
Sandy Bodner, a former Hill, Holliday colleague and longtime friend, recalled that Mr. Sansolo “was famous for remembering everything he ever heard, read, or said.”
Mr. Sansolo “was very witty and just so articulate,” said Bodner, who added that speaking with him “was like consulting the Encyclopedia Britannica if you had any questions.”
In strategy sessions with colleagues as they prepared presentations for clients, Bodner said, “Jack never took a note, and he never had a piece of paper with him going into these big pitches — nothing. It was all from memory and it was all perfect.”
He had been working at a research and consulting firm in New York City when Connors recruited him to join Hill, Holliday in the early 1980s.
Mr. Sansolo was vice chairman for marketing and corporate development when Connors appointed him, in 1988, to be the first president of the agency’s US division, the Globe reported.
That year he also played a key role in Hill, Holliday triumphing over dozens of other firms to land what was reported to be a $50 million to $60 million account for Infiniti, a luxury car Nissan was introducing.
The firm launched a Los Angeles branch, near Nissan’s North American headquarters, which grew to more than 100 employees. Mr. Sansolo initially flew back and forth from Boston to Los Angeles, until deciding to live in California — a surprising step for someone who had grown up in New York City, far removed from LA’s car commuting culture.
“Jack was a born and bred New Yorker,” said his husband, Dean Waller. “He was the first person in his family to have a driver’s license.”
Though Mr. Sansolo previously was somewhat uncomfortable driving, Waller said he “fell in love with Southern California.”
In Los Angeles, Mr. Sansolo also shifted his executive focus back to strategy and building new business for Hill, Holliday.
In November 1992, Nissan moved the Infiniti account from Hill, Holliday to Chiat/Day/Mojo, a firm that already handled most of the rest of Nissan’s North American advertising. The loss of an account estimated by then to be worth about $100 million in billings was a difficult episode for Hill, Holliday.
The firm kept its LA office open for about six months as Mr. Sansolo led efforts to find new jobs for the branch’s workers.
“It was like an outplacement service until we could get everybody employed,” DeSisto Joyce said.
At the end, Connors tried to bring Mr. Sansolo back to Boston, but he wanted to stay in California. He opened his own consulting firm and among his first clients was Hill, Holliday.
Mr. Sansolo was “a synthesizer,” Waller said. “He hated linear thinking. He was known at Hill, Holliday for saying, ‘Take this to the next level.’ And at the next level, he’d say, ‘Take it to the next level.’ He was always looking for more.”
In 1993, after Hill, Holliday’s West Coast operation closed, he focused on taking his own career to the next level.
Born in New York City on Aug. 22, 1943, Mr. Sansolo grew up in the Bronx in a family of modest means and Sephardic Jewish ancestry. He and his older brother slept in the bedroom of their family’s one-bedroom apartment, and their parents slept on a pull-out sofa in the living room.
His father, Louie Sansolo, was a Turkish immigrant who left home as a teenager to avoid serving in the military. “His father did not have an eighth-grade education, but he could converse in nine languages,” Waller said.
In New York, Louie was a clerk in Times Square shops, including a magic store, where Mr. Sansolo’s mother, Mary Abravaya Sansolo, also sometimes worked. A daughter of Turkish immigrants, she was “a wonderful woman and she knew what she stood for,” Waller said.
After graduating from William Howard Taft High School and Hunter College in New York, Mr. Sansolo received a doctorate from Harvard.
Before joining Hill, Holliday, he had worked for AT&T, as an adjunct professor at the New School for Social Research, as a lecturer at the University of London, and at a New York research and consulting firm.
Mr. Sansolo’s consulting work post-Hill, Holliday led to him being hired as head of marketing for Eddie Bauer in Seattle. He then returned to freelancing before he ran marketing for Getty Images and retired in 2007.
During the years when companies were recruiting Mr. Sansolo as a consultant or executive, Waller said, “I remember him coming home and saying, ‘I had these interviews and at the end they would ask, do you have anything else to say? And I would say, I don’t know why you wouldn’t hire me.’”
At times Mr. Sansolo “was kind of brazen,” Waller added with a laugh.
He is Mr. Sansolo’s only immediate survivor. At Mr. Sansolo’s request, there will be no memorial gathering.
When Mr. Sansolo died, Waller said, they had been a couple for “47 years, eight months, and five days,” marrying in 2013 after they had been together for more than 36 years.
They lived in Greater Boston on five occasions during their years together, the last time in Cambridge. Waller’s career was in marketing research as a freelancer.
“Together, the two of us were able to live a life that neither one of us could have imagined growing up. That was an amazing thing,” Waller said. “Someone asked me, ‘What was the highlight of your life together?’ I said, ‘There wasn’t a highlight. It was all a highlight.’”
Bryan Marquard can be reached at [email protected].
