Gerald Powers

Gerald Powers, a former Boston University public relations professor who was known as a demanding teacher but nevertheless befriended and mentored scores of students inside and outside the classroom and tirelessly worked his professional network to help them land jobs, died Jan. 27 in Boston. He was 93.

His death, at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, was confirmed by Karl Scholz, a former student who visited Mr. Powers regularly. The cause was hypotension due to ventricular tachycardia.

A graduate of Harvard University, Mr. Powers started teaching at BU’s College of Communications in 1964, intending to stay in the job only a few years. He stayed 35, before ascending to emeritus status. Over the years, as former students climbed the ranks in communications fields, Mr. Powers, who was never known for his subtlety, pushed, cajoled, and badgered them into providing internships to BU students.

“I call them up and say, 'Can you take an intern? I remember 20 years ago I placed you as an intern,’” Mr. Powers once recalled in a 1999 article in PRWeek, a trade magazine. “They can’t say no.”

Many of these former students ended up forming friendships with each other, creating a large, post-BU professional network they could rely on for career advice and job searches. Some playfully referred to themselves as “Gerry’s kids” or the “Powers mafia.”

Mr. Powers once estimated he had taught some 3,000 students, and he had hundreds of their names and numbers in his Rolodex. PRWeek’s 1999 article, which marked his retirement from BU, referred to him as “the best-connected man in PR.”

“Gerry had an amazing network of folks who owed him, and he leveraged that,” said Roger Bridgeman, a former student who has headed his own public relations firm in Boston for thirty years. “But when he called, he never said, ‘I need…’ He’d say, ‘I’ve got this student. Can you give them a hand?”

Loud, gregarious, and never shy about telling bawdy stories, Mr. Powers typically made himself the center of attention at social gatherings, laughing at his own jokes and reeling off one anecdote after another. A prodigious reader of history, he frequently accentuated his yarns with quotes from Winston Churchill, Yogi Berra, and Ernest Hemingway, as well as obscure historical figures that left his listeners puzzled.

When he was about to turn 50 in 1982, he goaded some former students into organizing – and paying for – an elaborate celebrity roast at the Harvard Club. He pushed them into doing it again when he turned 60, 70, and 80.

In the classroom, Mr. Powers took on a gruff persona intended to shock students and send the message that half-hearted efforts would not cut it. For the first class of each new semester, he walked in brandishing a bull whip, explaining that it was indicative of his teaching style.

In writing classes – Mr. Powers’ forte – he liberally marked up students’ papers with a red marker and tough criticism. He once handed back an essay covered in red ink with the note, “No, I did not cut myself shaving.”

But he also employed a rewrite policy, allowing students to fix and resubmit their work. Through this process of writing and re-writing, most students saw their ability, and confidence, improve rapidly.

“The unvarnished critique wasn’t mean-spirited,” said Kevin Smith-Fagan, a 1986 BU grad who now lives in Sacramento, Calif. “It was designed to make you a better writer and he knew your growth was going to come from honest feedback.”

Mr. Powers never married and never had children of his own. Students who stood out in his classes, though, were often invited to dinners at the Harvard Club, Mr. Powers’ favorite haunt, or the opera or the Boston Symphony. When one student returned the favor and took Mr. Powers to a Rolling Stones concert, the strait-laced professor showed up in a coat and tie.

Inevitably, students in the midst of the ups and downs of college turned to Mr. Powers for support. “I sometimes feel like the priest in the confessional in this office,' he told PRWeek. “I've had students come in here and just open up about their problems.”

At the end of the school year, he would borrow a friend’s home in Vermont or Cape Cod and host a weekend celebration for seniors. On graduation day, he invited students and their parents to a cocktail party at his condo in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood.

In summers, Mr. Powers loved to travel the globe, often to less traveled destinations like the Soviet Union, Machu Pichu, and Thailand. With some graduating students he was particularly close to, he took celebratory voyages before they started their first jobs – road trips across the United States, and jaunts to Europe.

Mr. Powers used to say he’d lost track of how many students’ weddings he’d been invited to. At several, he served as best man.

“I think for all of us, it’s true to say we started out as student and teacher, and ended up being family,” Mr. Scholz said.

Gerald Powers was born July 23, 1932, in Gloucester, Massachusetts. His father, Dr. Edward P. Powers, was a physician, and his mother, Alice J (Jordon) Powers, a homemaker. He had three older brothers, Edward, Richard and Gael.

Mr. Powers went to Harvard, graduating with a degree in English in 1954. He then served three years in the U.S. Army in Germany, where he worked himself into a job as the editor of a military newspaper, and became hooked on travel. When he returned, he earned a masters in journalism at Boston University and worked a few years in public relations jobs before taking his first teaching position at Babson College before he landed at BU.

Mr. Powers lived for many years with his mother in Jamaica Plain where he grew up. He gained tenure in 1972 and later started a lucrative side business teaching writing seminars for corporate executives – often at firms where former students worked.

After his retirement, BU started a scholarship to honor him, and Mr. Powers continued hitting up former students – to fund it. “Unlike Gen. McArthur,” Mr. Powers said in 1999, “I am not fading away.”

He is survived by a niece, Alice Powell, of South Lyon, MI and Mary Fowler-Huston of Moultonborough, NH.

Funeral services will be held Feb. 21, at 11 a.m. in Boston University’s Marsh Chapel, 735 Commonwealth Ave., Boston. Relatives and friends are kindly invited to attend. Interment Private.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Gerald Powers Public Relations Award Fund, https://www.bu.edu/gerrypowers