A Thurman Legacy: Passion for Politics

By Kathie A. Smith
Bee Capitol Bureau

Sacramento - Little did Susan Thurman know, growing up on her parents' Stanislaus Country dairy farm, that one day she would meet up with the Russian "banana Mafia".

Susan, the youngest of John and Julie Thurman's three children, was born on May 6, 1956, her father's 37th birthday.

Life is full of surprises and one unexpected twist in Susan's life occurred in1972 - long before the banana bad guys entered her life - when her dairyman dad, the gregarious John Thurman, quit local politics to run for the California Assembly. Thurman won the race and became a local Democratic folk hero, of sorts, a popular public servant who spent 10 years in the Legislature - from 1972 to 1982.

He died of a heart attack in 1983.

Perhaps the shared birth date was an omen, because Susan is the only one of the Thurman kids who gravitated toward politics.

Thurman, 38, is executive vice-president of the The PBN Company, a San Francisco-based public affairs/public relations firm started in 1983 by Thurman and her husband-to-be, Peter B. Necarsulmer. The couple married two years later. Necarsulmer is president of PBN. A third partner, Sam J. Sacco, is senior vice president and runs the company's Sacramento office.

Among PBN's many undertakings - from crisis management to international conference management - is a strong involvement in California's ballot initiative process.

Thurman said she and Necarsulmer decided early on that they didn't want to run candidate campaigns, but they would do initiative campaigns.

PBN runs at least one initiative campaign per election. Some of their past campaigns include higher education bond measures, No on Prop. 134, the 1990 alcohol tax initiative, and No on Prop. 166, a health care reform measure.

"We really are bipartisan and we structure ourselves so that we maintain that bipartisanship," Thurman said during an interview at the firm's Sacramento office.

PBN's clients range from conservative industries, such as petroleum and insurance to more liberal causes, such as Children Now and the International Bird Rescue Association.

"There are things we won't do," Thurman said. "There are two criteria when we are talking to clients: the issue they are working on, and the integrity of the company or the organization."

Among PBN's pro bono clients are the American Red Cross; Children Now; San Francisco Sports Council, Inc.; the Shanti Project, and, The Yosemite Fund.

Paying clients include Chevron USA, the California Tomato Growers Association; the American Russian Youth Orchestra; Rodale Press, publisher of Prevention Magazine and Clean Bay, an oil spill response cooperative.

In 1993 "Inside PR" magazine named PBN the top regional public affairs firm in the United States. The firm has more than 50 client organizations and offices in 10 cities and three countries - the United States, Russia and the former Soviet Republic of Moldova.

PBN's big international break came in 1990 when the company was tapped by San Francisco mayor Art Agnos to coordinate Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's historic visit to the Bay Area. The Gorbachev event gave PBN an inside track with the Russians, and the company parlayed that little twist into an international business success story.

In 1991 PBN opened a Moscow office, and within a year Necarsulmer had launched the International Press Center and Club in Moscow, the first independent press center in Eastern Europe. The center serves the 1,200 members of the international press corps assigned to Moscow, and is a meeting place for executives and politicians from around the world.

The Russian connection proved invaluable in 1993 when Chiquita Brands International called on PBN to find a market for a glut of bananas. PBN convinced Chiquita to give away 10 million bananas to fruit -starved Muscovites - just in time for Christmas.

"Russians are crazy about bananas", Thurman said with a laugh.

The result: a new market for Chiquita's bananas and a new frontier for PBN.

"Russia today reminds me in a lot of ways of the wild, wild West, a mixture of entrepreneurs and bandits … People kind of go their own ways", Thurman said. "There are people who are trying to control all that is coming in and going out of the country.

"We had to help (Chiquita) avoid the banana Mafia.

Ducking trouble, a useful talent for someone involved in crisis management, may be a hidden benefit of Susan's place in the Thurman family hierarchy.

Her mother, Julie, who lives in Modesto, remembers her youngest child as the more focused of her three children.

"I had to make sure Bob and Janice did their homework. I never told Susan; she just did it," Julie Thurman recalled recently.

Susan credits her older siblings for teaching her - by example.

"Being the youngest, I saw that if I didn't do things, I was going to get in trouble," she said.

All three Thurman siblings are hard-working, said their mother. "They are like their dad - they don't know when to stop."

Today, Janice is western regional senior vice president for a mortgage banking company. Robert and his family live on and run the dairy.

It was Susan, however, who loved the campaign trail.

"My brother was the one who followed dad in the dairy, my sister was the renegade one who went off and did her own thing, and I followed dad in politics," she said.

"But, for most of my childhood, he wasn't in politics, and I had the luxury of having both parents home on the ranch. I'd come home from school and run down to visit Dad in the barn milking. I had my grandparents on the other end of the ranch.

"Sometimes I feel a little guilty. If people are looking for what in my childhood was screwed up, it's like, I don't know, it was pretty idyllic."

In fact, it wasn't until Susan was in junior high school that John Thurman started dabbling in local politics, first running for the Hart-Ransom School Board and then for the Stanislaus County Board of Supervisors.

"Dad used to pick me up and my friends from school and drop us off at a precinct and make us walk the precinct. Then he'd take us to a little hamburger place on McHenry and buy us all a hamburger," she said, smiling at the memory. "That was kind of our reward for walking a precinct for him during the campaign. It was a lot of fun growing up with dad in politics."

But, being the candidate's daughter had its hardships, too.

"I remember a couple of times, walking precincts, when we would knock on the door and happen to run into somebody who didn't like dad, and they would say horrible things about him, she said. "And you're standing there - a 13-year old - saying "That's my father." It was a little tough."

Those painful moments didn't dampen Susan's interest in politics, which may be genetic. After all, her maternal grandmother, Mary Forni, was a devout and active Republican.

"I think the only Democrat she ever voted for was my Dad," Thurman said. "When Mom and Dad were out going to functions, she and I would be sitting there folding envelopes or licking stamps. She would always try to convert dad into becoming a Republican, which was never successful."

Nor has the younger Thurman converted. Although PBN is bipartisan in both its hiring practices and its client base, Thurman personally supports and works for Democratic causes and candidates.

The love of politics, Thurman believes, is an innate passion.

When she interviews prospective employees, she said, I often tell them, "I can help you learn how to write. I can help you learn how to do press programs. But I can't teach you how to love politics. Either you understand and love politics or you don't."

Thurman was fresh out of college with a degree in education from San Francisco State University when she was lured back to Modesto in 1979 to work on her father's unsuccessful run against Republican Ken Maddy for a seat in the state Senate. She discovered, for the first time, that she could earn money doing what she loved most.

"All of a sudden there were all these people getting paid to work on a campaign," she recalled. "I was thinking, "Wait a second, you can make a profession out of this."

She's never looked back, except for quick, nostalgic glances over her shoulder to an idyllic childhood on a Stanislaus County dairy ranch.