A guitar in an advertising executive’s office is a useful complication. It suggests that the occupant may have interests beyond the next presentation, and perhaps a way to change the atmosphere without calling a meeting about changing the atmosphere. Kevin McShane remembered one in Ken Begasse Sr.’s office at McAdams. Years later, when former colleagues recalled Senior, the instrument still belonged in the picture.
So did the people. Their memories return to help given at the beginning of a career, attention paid during a difficult transition, and the feeling that a senior person had time for someone further down the organisation. These are small units of professional history. They rarely make an annual report. They are also the things people can describe when the annual reports have become difficult to remember.
Begasse was an advertising executive who worked across a succession of agencies, joined Concentric, and eventually served as its CEO. His son, Ken Begasse Jr., shared his name and his profession. Michael Sanzen shared the work of building Concentric with the family. Senior died in December 2010. The story that continued around him would acquire an award, a painting, and many more witnesses than a conventional résumé can accommodate.
An account executive before the tributes
His advertising career began at Kimmich & Company, a small agency in Norwalk, Connecticut. A chance encounter had opened the way into the business. He joined as an account executive and spent a decade there before moving to Sudler & Hennessey. The subsequent names included Lowe McAdams, Nelson Communications, CommonHealth and MBS/VOX. It was a working life lived through institutions rather than attached to a single permanent doorplate.
That itinerary matters because it gives his later mentoring a setting. Account work places a person between different kinds of expertise: the client who needs an answer, the creative team making something, and the colleagues responsible for turning a promise into a deliverable. The job has ample opportunities for misunderstanding. A career across several agencies brings repeated introductions, repeated adjustments, and repeated chances to learn how other people work.
Begasse also had a business degree from Pace University. Scott Cotherman remembered him as a fellow student in the Pharmaceutical Advertising Council Dartmouth Program. The Dartmouth connection is a modest detail beside an executive title, but it makes the professional network tangible. Before Cotherman would speak about Senior at a recognition ceremony, they had occupied the less ceremonial position of classmates.
Making a place for someone
Jeff Halpern’s recollection is more specific than the familiar claim that an executive was supportive. Halpern had been working in public relations. Begasse helped him move into advertising at Medicus and showed him how to use the strategic and account skills he already possessed. Halpern remembered that Begasse created a position for him. The welcome came with an actual place to work.
There is a difference in scale between encouragement and an appointment. The first can leave an organisation’s routines untouched. The second asks those routines to accommodate a person. Halpern’s account gives the word mentor a practical meaning: someone took the time to see how existing experience could fit a new profession, then helped make the fit possible.
Other colleagues remembered related qualities. Jennifer Valentine described feeling valued regardless of her title. Sue Wernik Gross remembered finding time to listen and help. These are recollections, with the intimacy and selectiveness recollection always carries. Yet their recurring subject is striking. The accounts concern how it felt to work near him, and what that proximity made easier. The professional result was personal enough to remain memorable long after the colleagues had moved on.
“He really led from behind.”
Ken Begasse Jr., remembering his father
The father at Concentric
The Concentric chapter brought the professional story into the family circle. Senior helped build the business with his son and Sanzen. His family described that work as the fulfilment of a longstanding ambition. An appointment notice published in January 2008 identified him as managing partner and chief strategic officer, with responsibilities for business development and strategic consulting. Before that move, he had been an executive vice president and account group director at Klemtner Advertising.
Rich Norman remembered the pleasure on Senior’s face when he announced that he was leaving to join his son’s agency. Norman had worked alongside him in several organisations. In the memory, the move has the force of a personal decision, rather than merely another stop on a list of senior positions. The shared surname had become a shared workplace.
Junior’s later recollections give his father’s strategic instincts a sharper edge. Senior pushed people to think beyond an obvious answer or an easily sold proposal. His son put the standard plainly: “He’d rather lose a pitch with the right strategy than win a pitch with a strategy that couldn’t work.” The sentence carries a difficult bargain. Winning the room and producing useful work can make different demands. Senior’s preference, as Junior remembered it, was to keep the work’s eventual purpose in view.
Memory does not settle every question
A portrait of a working life also has to accommodate records that sit uneasily beside affectionate recollection. In April 2014, a New York appellate court allowed age discrimination and retaliation claims against Concentric to continue. The case concerned the dismissal of a billing manager. In discussing disputed explanations for her termination, the court identified Senior’s addition of extensive negative comments to a performance review.
The decision did not establish that the allegations were proved. It found questions that prevented the defendants from obtaining the dismissal they sought. That procedural distinction matters. So does the existence of the dispute. A colleague’s grateful memory and a contested employment record describe different encounters with the same organisation.
The remembered mentor should therefore remain a person rather than become an immaculate management principle. People experience workplaces from different positions. An opportunity offered to one employee does not resolve the experience of another. Keeping that complexity in the frame makes the positive recollections more precise: these particular colleagues remembered these particular acts of help. Their testimony is meaningful without being universal.
The family picture becomes a painting
There was another way of remembering him, and it began with a family photograph. In 2015, Sanzen commissioned artist Borbay to paint Senior as a surprise gift for the Begasse family. Christine, Junior’s wife, helped select the composition and the collage elements. The preparation was personal: people who knew the subject were involved in deciding what the artist should carry onto the canvas.
The finished work places a smiling face against a surface assembled with fragments of print. It is recognisably a portrait and recognisably made, its coloured planes and paper pieces visible. A photographic expression has travelled into an object with its own texture. The artist’s studio photographs let the viewer see that translation underway, rather than encounter only the final, apparently inevitable result.
For an advertising executive, the collage offers a pleasing visual coincidence: printed language surrounds the face of someone whose business involved making messages. That is a reading of the image, rather than a claim about what Senior would have chosen. The concrete gesture was Sanzen’s commission, helped by Christine’s knowledge of the family. In December 2015, the artwork and its making became part of a mural unveiled at Concentric’s Tribeca headquarters. A private gift had acquired a place in the working day.
The award after the goodbye
On February 11, 2016, at The Pierre in New York, Senior received a posthumous Lifetime Achievement Award from the Medical Advertising Hall of Fame. Marshall Paul and Scott Cotherman were the year’s other honorees. Cotherman spoke about the father’s influence on Junior and remembered their shared Dartmouth programme. The recognition brought an old educational connection, a family relationship and an industry career into the same room.
A ceremony gives remembrance a date and a venue. It can place a career beside others, identify what a profession chooses to honour, and provide a moment for people to gather. It cannot reproduce the conversations that made the relationship matter. Those survive in less formal places: a colleague’s account of a career change, a son’s recollection of an argument about strategy, an instrument remembered in an office.
Outside work, Senior’s family remembered his love of guitar playing and the pleasure he took in having family around him. Their description makes the instrument at McAdams feel less like a decorative eccentricity. Music belonged to his life. It could travel with him into a workplace because the executive and the guitarist occupied the same person.
That combination helps explain why the office detail has lasted. A guitar is easy to remember, but a colleague who remembers it also remembers a particular room and a particular person. The object brings the career back to ordinary scale. Senior could occupy a senior position and still leave an impression that was informal, approachable and quite separate from the wording on his business card.
The painting supplies a face. The award supplies a public marker. The colleagues supply actions: listening, making an introduction, creating a role, offering encouragement. Together they leave a portrait with more movement than a title permits. To understand Ken Begasse Sr.’s continuing place in their lives, it helps to look at what happened to the people around him. Many had already gone elsewhere. They still knew whom to thank.