Remembering Bill Lutholtz
As Neville and I recorded our first podcast on Monday, I recalled that we met online probably a dozen years ago when we were both participants in Compuserve’s late Public Relations & Marketing Forum. In the pre-Web days, the PRSIG was virtually the only online destination for PR professionals, and thousands of us congregated there. As we thought about it, we remembered that in 1994, we used the IABC Hyperspace section of the PRSIG to upload close-to-real-time reports of the IABC international conference. Little did we know that we were blogging a conference a decade before the activity got the label of “blogging a conference.”
The discussion of PRSIG got me reminiscing, which I did while listening to podcasts (Adam Curry, Dave Winer, Todd Cochrane) on my flight to DC. It was Bill Lutholtz, ABC, who introduced me to PRSIG. I don’t remember how we hooked up, or how Bill learned of my advocacy for an online home for IABC. But he contacted me and let me know that IABC already had an online outpost on PRSIG, even though it wasn’t official. (In fact, as I recall, IABC had never heard of it). I’d never heard of it, either, so Bill instructed me how to join Compuserve and helped navigate to PRSIG and to the IABC Hyperspace section.
It was on PRSIG that I met many of the people I now consider not only colleagues but friends, like Charles Pizzo and Pete Shinbach. I was a regular reader of Marty Winston’s diatribes. I downloaded files other had contributed. I got answers to questions and solutions to problems. It was one of the most revealing experiences of my life.
Ultimately, under Bill’s tutelage, I became an assistant sysop on PRSIG, working initially under Ron Solberg, the PRSIG sysop, building up IABC’s official online presence (I was serving on the IABC international executive board at the time) and hosting another section as well. Bill was always available to handle my questions as I ramped up as an assistant sysop. He was also a relentless contributor to the forum, where he also served as an assistant sysop. Bill also helped establish the first PR-focused e-mail mailing list with a colleague at the University of Indiana’s Indianapolis campus, which hosted the list.
I finally met Bill, a communicator from Indianapolis, at a conference somewhere in the midwest where we both were speaking. I remember spending a lot of time absorbing his ideas for online communication. It’s a gross understatement to note that Bill was ahead of his time.
Not too long after that, Bill contracted leukemia. He used the PRSIG to chronicle his efforts to battle the illness. (You can still read some of his chronicle on The Lutheran Web site.) One day in 1995, I e-mailed him, apologizing for the interruption, but I needed help performing some sysop duty. He responded from his hospital room (he had cajoled the staff to give him an open phone line so he could dial out) with a lengthy explanation filled with his usual enthusiasm and good humor. I was stunned to learn that he succumbed to his illness two days later.
I was not alone in nominating Bill for posthumous recognition as a recipient of IABC’s chairman’s award. I was there when his widow and children came to an IABC conference to accept the honor on his behalf. Now, a decade later I wonder how many people remember Bill. So much has changed since those early days. PRSIG is gone; Ron Solberg’s successor Mike Bayer finally shut it down when it became clear that the Web had fragmented the online PR community and that the Compuserve forum was no longer sustainable. It’s easy for somebody like Bill to recede from memory, given that he barely lived to see Compuserve evolve from its early VT100 terminal emulation days, no less the massive changes wrought by the Web.
Bill was quiet and dignified in his promotion of online tools as a channel for communication, but his influence resonates today. It would be a shame if his contribution to the profession was forgotten. He doesn’t have the name that some others have established in the field, but we all stand on his shoulders.
01/04/05 | 5 Comments | Remembering Bill Lutholtz