Chandler G. “Chan” Ketchum established the Ketchum Brothers Educational Fund in 1987 to honor his father, Kenneth, and Kenneth’s three brothers—Carlton, George and Francis.
The Ketchum brothers grew up extremely poor, living in Monassen, Pennsylvania with their widowed mother and their grandfather—a former travelling preacher who’d founded five teachers colleges across the country. The boys eventually made their way to the University of Pittsburgh, where Carlton became Secretary to the Chancellor (later passing the job on to George) and Kenneth ran the book store. Later, all four Ketchum brothers served in World War I—Carlton was an officer; George, an aviator; Kenneth fought as an infantryman in France; Francis joined the Navy.
The brothers were talented writers, too. Francis became a reporter after the war; George and Carlton started an ad agency. Founded in 1919, Ketchum Advertising’s first campaign was a fundraiser for the Jewish War Relief Fund. It was unusual at the time to open an ad agency outside of Chicago or New York, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and the young company struggled to stay afloat. “Pittsburgh and Paradise had little in common,” George Ketchum wrote, “but at least I knew some Pittsburghers, and Mother and the family were there. So, in a disjointed sort of way, I set out to see if I could get started on a business of my own.”
The company got its big break in 1925, when the agency was asked to fundraise for the University of Pittsburgh’s new Cathedral of Learning. The company took off, growing so fast that the brothers had to split it in two. A few decades and a generation later, the Ketchums had offices up and down the West Coast. By the 1970s, they’d gone international. Until it merged with the New York-based Omnicom conglomerate in 1996, Ketchum Incorporated was the 5th-largest independently owned communications firm in the world. (The company, now owned by Omnicom, continues to operate under the Ketchum name.)
The Ketchum brothers’ relationship with The Pittsburgh Foundation stretches all the way back to the Foundation’s founding in 1945—George and Carlton Ketchum were friends with Stanton Belfour, The Pittsburgh Foundation’s first director. Today, the Ketchum Brothers Educational Fund continues to support education initiatives, health and human rights organizations, and scholarship opportunities for Pittsburghers.