Thurayne "Terry" Pimsleur's Obituary
Terry Pimsleur Obituary Terry Pimsleur, a pioneering woman entrepreneur, who was widely know as the 'Queen of Street Fairs,' died September 16 after a lengthy illness. She was 77. Pimsleur spent more than 30 years creating, producing, and marketing hundreds of major free public festivals. As president of Terry Pimsleur & Company, Inc., an advertising and public relations firm, she created the genre of the modern day Street Fair and Festival, with award-winning graphics and posters and including fine art, crafts, music, dancing in the streets, contests and mid-block cafes serving food and drink. Her annual events were designed as marketing tools for her nonprofit clients and attracted more than a million fairgoers annually. A founder, former president and board member of CalFest, the professional organization that represents special events in California and Nevada, she was one of fewer than 200 Certified Festival and Event Executives worldwide. Her background in media included work as a disc jockey, writer, and director of radio and television programs and theatrical productions in her native Ohio. She was host of her own show, 'Fun Farm,' a live TV children's program in Toledo. From her office, a converted Victorian on Union Street, she launched the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival in 1971. The annual event became one the best known and most emulated festivals in the world. She founded and directed the International Pumpkin Association whose mission was to promote pumpkin farming and sharing of seeds. It spawned an international pumpkin weigh-off competition, resulting in ever-increasing sizes of the fruit, hardiness of the plants and the fertility of the seed. When the weigh-offs began, the early winning pumpkins weighed barely 100 pounds. Last year's Great Pumpkin, grown in Massachusetts, weighed in at 1,689 pounds! The success of the Pumpkin Festival prompted then San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein, in 1976, to ask Pimsleur to recreate the festival as a street fair on San Francisco's Union Street. The concept then expanded as a method for revitalizing neighborhoods throughout the City, around the State and internationally. At the peak of her business, Terry Pimsleur and Company, headquartered on Union Street, managed an unprecedented number of fairs and festivals, culminating in 1988 when the company produced 16 of these upscale events. These events, in addition to the Pumpkin Festival and the Union Street Fair, included Jazz and All That Art on Fillmore Street and the North Beach Festival in San Francisco. In addition, she produced street fairs and festivals around the State from San Anselmo to Southern California. On June 1, 1991, then Mayor Art Agnos proclaimed it 'Terry Pimsleur Day' in San Francisco. Pimsleur was born in Rockford, Illinois, of Cherokee descent, and raised in Toledo, Ohio. She was educated at the University of Toledo. She worked as Society Editor, Women's News Editor and as a columnist for the Toledo Blade before moving to California, where she worked as Society Editor for the San Francisco Examiner. Subsequently, she did political work for then Governor Edmond G. 'Pat' Brown and Speaker of the Assembly, Jesse Unruh. She started her own public relations agency in the mid 1960s. 'We were doing public relations and advertising,' according to a lengthy 1994 magazine profile. 'A lot of our clients were real estate firms and one had purchased 25 percent of the available land in Half Moon Bay, about 8000 acres. So we did a market survey. People told us the weather's bad and there's nothing to do once you get there. Then the vice president said, 'Fix it.' So we did.' The same profile described Pimsleur as 'a successful, controlled business woman who moves in a calm and sophisticated world of tasteful rooms and orderly projects. She was given to a kind of understated style, an easy, unobtrusive elegance.' A passion for historic preservation led to a 30-year rebuilding project for the Johnston House Foundation of Half Moon Bay and historic research on San Francisco's Miranda Land Grant property in Cow Hollow, where she lived. 'She was a force of nature,' said longtime family friend, Brian Gatter. 'The world is a much less interesting place without her.' She is survived by her husband of 41 years, former Chronicle reporter Joel Pimsleur, her sister Barbara Duncan of Toledo, Ohio, sons Jeffery of San Rafael, Stevan of Danville, daughter Carol of Albuquerque, New Mexico, stepdaughter Adrienne of Portland, Oregon, four grandchildren, and her long-time business partner Dana Harrison. Donations in her name may be made to the Johnston House Foundation or a charity of choice. Services will be held at the Lifemark Center at Skylawn Memorial Park.
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