Scope and Content Note
The papers of Edgar Kobak span the years 1916-1966, with the bulk of the material concentrated in the period 1949-1962, during Kobak's semi-retirement as a business consultant and communications expert in New York. The collection consists of five series: Autobiographical Interview, General Correspondence and Related Papers , Speeches and Writings , Business Papers , and Miscellany . Included are subject files of personal business affairs and miscellaneous clippings and scrapbooks. In the correspondence is an autograph file of letters from prominent individuals who wrote to Kobak during his career with McGraw-Hill, the National Broadcasting Company, and other business firms for which he was either a consultant or director.
A key feature of the collection is an autobiographical account of the years Kobak spent at McGraw-Hill Publishing Company. Also of importance is the General Correspondence of letters sent and received from notable politicians, philanthropists, and military figures, mostly from the 1950s. The main portion of the correspondence, however, deals with companies that used Kobak's consulting service and with the various advertising and philanthropic organizations with which Kobak was associated in the last fifteen years of his life. Among the most significant and substantive of these letters are those from the National Association of Broadcasters, the S & C Electric Company, and the A. C. Nielsen Company. There are also several folders of papers for the period before 1949, as for example the correspondence files for the Mutual Broadcasting System and the National Broadcasting Company. Only a small amount of Kobak's personal correspondence is present in these papers, most of it with his son, Edgar H. Kobak.
The Speeches and Writings series, which covers the years 1928-1962, offers perhaps the best representation of Kobak's work in broadcasting. In them can be found material relating to the first generation of radio and television, to Kobak's expertise in public relations, and to federal policy concerning communications. A smaller and less significant part of the collection is the Business Papers file. It is devoted exclusively to Kobak's private business ventures with a farm and radio station in Thomson, Georgia.
Correspondents in addition to those cited include John Conrad, Nicholas J. Conrad, George Vernon Denny, Edward J. Mehren, and A. C. Nielsen. The autograph file contains brief notes, usually thank-you letters, from individuals such as John F. Kennedy, Adlai Stevenson (1900-1964), Harry S. Truman, Lucius D. Clay, and Tom Clark.