D. Dudley Bloom
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David Dudley Bloom (1922- ) is a retired American lawyer and businessman, known for having made innovations in marketing, product development, and real estate development over the course of a career lasting a half-century.
Between 1954 and 1962, D. Dudley Bloom broadened the use of product tie-ins in the American toy industry as marketing director and, later, vice-president for marketing of the American Metals Specialties Corporation (AMSCO), a manufacturer of playthings for youngsters located in Hatboro, Pennsylvania. Manufacturers of consumer goods placed miniature items of their products in sets designed for children in order to introduce children to the brand names they would later encounter as adult shoppers. Johnson and Johnson, Proctor and Gamble, General Foods, and many other manufacturers helped sponsor these toys, and Bloom's innovations at AMSCO helped turn a floundering $2 million a year company into a widely known and respected toy manufacturer with $10 million in revenues in 1960.
Toys for which Bloom was responsible included Dollee's Play Kitchen, the Pet Milk Magic Milk Bottle, and the Shirley Temple Theater, among many others. The paper-and-plastic packaging he designed for these items continues to be used by the toy industry decades later, as are the toys themselves under different names and by different manufacturers.
Between 1957 and 1959, Bloom served as vice president of marketing for Atlantic Products Corporation of Trenton, New Jersey--now Atlantic Luggage Corporation--where he popularized the company's signature sets of Scotch plaid luggage and its ubiquitous logo, the sea horse, a half century later still attached to every item of luggage the company manufactures and included in every advertisement published by the Elmwood City, Pennsylvania firm. It was at Atlantic in the spring of 1957 that Bloom first conceived the idea of putting luggage on wheels--an idea not taken up by the industry for another fifteen years and later patented by Bernard Sadow of U. S. luggage. At the time, Bloom took his idea to the company's president and was rebuffed, told that "no one would want to buy luggage on wheels". Needless to say, Bloom had the last laugh.
In 1962, Bloom left AMSCO and attempted unsuccessfully to introduce to American businesses a consumer product that subsequently became universal throughout the world but that at that time was unknown--the continuous-play tape recorder. Pioneer Electronics Corporation of Tokyo and Kobe, Japan, manufactured three hundred, teakwood-encased tape recorders according to Bloom's specifications, mainly for use at point-of-sale marketing locations such as department and specialty stores and for home personal use, and Bloom founded International Audio Corporation in his adoptive hometown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to market the recorders. But unfortunately most of the machines were delivered in the fall of 1964 in non-working order, and International Audio folded the following summer.
In the fall of 1965 Bloom switched career gears and in order to take advantage of his legal training at Dickinson School of Law, Carlisle, Pennsylvania--now Penn State University-The Dickinson School of Law, became a real estate broker, specializing initially in land development in Florida and the Bahama Islands in association with the Greenfield Realty Company, headed by Albert M. Greenfield, Jr., scion of the Philadelphia real estate corporation founded by his namesake father, Albert M. Greenfield and Company. Over the course of the next two decades as a principal broker, Bloom helped create several warm-weather communities, including Duck Cay and Lucaya/Freeport in the Bahamas and Palm Coast, Palm Beach Colony, and Bonaventure in Flagler County, Florida.
With Philadelphia steadily growing as an international medical center during the 1970s and 1980's and in association with Bloom's wife since 1953, Nancy Bloom, who became a real estate salesperson in 1966, Dudley Bloom in 1970 founded D. Dudley Bloom and Associates, a residential real estate company located in Ardmore and, later, Wynnewood, Pennsylvania. The company son became widely known as a residential relocation center of first resort among physician personnel at the major teaching hospitals and medical schools in Philadelphia, including the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Jefferson Medical College, Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital, Temple University School of Medicine, and the Medical College of Pennsylvania (now combined with Hahnemann to form Drexel University College of Medicine).
D. Dudley Bloom was born September 20, 1922, in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, the son of businessman and banker Harry Aiken Bloom (1878-1969) and bookkeeper Cecile Gaffin Bloom (1891-1973), who had begun her career with Macy's Department Stores of New York City in 1909. As a boy he attended Chambersburg's public schools and clerked in his family's Bloom Brothers Department Stores of Chambersburg and Waynesboro in Pennsylvania's Franklin County, graduating from Chambersburg High School in 1939. He attended Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and graduated five months early in January 1943 with a bachelor's degree in German and history, so he could serve in the U. S. Navy during World War II.
Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Bloom enlisted in the Navy's Officers Training Program and attended its Officers Training School (OTS) at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, before being shipped overseas after further training to serve as chief operations officer and, later, commander of the refrigerator supply ship YP 278, the USS Liberty, in the Papua New Guinea and Philippine campaigns in the southwest Pacific war theater. After the war was declared over in August 1945, Bloom became commanding officer of the Navy's Atlantic fleet flagship, the USS Mizpah (PY 29) before being granted an honorable discharge in March 1946.
After the war, Bloom attended Dickinson School of Law (now Pennsylvania State University's Dickinson School of Law), also in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, graduating in June 1948 with a J. D. degree. After clerking in the law offices of Ullmann and Painter in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, Bloom moved in the spring of 1949 to Philadelphia and became an assistant buyer of men's clothing for Lit Brothers Department Stores. After meeting his future wife, Nancy Lee Blum, in March 1953, he joined A. J. Wood and Company, marketing consultants of New York, where he soon mastered the then-new fields of product marketing and advertising.
D. Dudley Bloom lives in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania, and Palm Beach, Florida, with his wife, Nancy, and has two grown sons and two grandchildren.
