Earl Bunting*

Earl Bunting was born and raised in Berryville, Illinois. He worked his way through college at the University of California at Berkeley as a surveyor's stake boy and graduated in 1912 with a degree in industrial and management engineering.

By the 1920s, Bunting had established his own marketing and industrial engineering consulting firm. In the 1930s and 1940s, he became the director of several companies, including O'Sullivan Rubber Company, and he became involved with the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) as chairman of NAM's marketing research committee. In 1945, he became a director of NAM, and in 1946, he took over as president.

Bunting spent the subsequent decade as NAM's managing director, establishing himself as a resilient political advocate on the behalf of U.S. manufacturers. He also served on the rubber advisory committee of the War Production Board during World War II and was named vice chairman of the President's Committee on the Physically Handicapped by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1954. He later founded Earl Bunting International Geonomics, a global consulting firm.