Avery Dennison Corp. recently announced that former chairman H. Russell Smith died on September 7 at the age of 100. Smith reportedly played an essential role in the development of the company into a Fortune 500 enterprise. For nearly 40 years, he was company founder R. Stanton Avery’s partner in entrepreneurship, translating Avery’s inventions—the first self-adhesive labels and label-making machinery—into a fully organized enterprise capable of keeping up with the rapid growth in demand.
“Someone once said our natures were balanced like a well-tuned gyroscope,” Avery said. “I supplied the imagination and Russ the reality that kept us in business.”