A family affair
At age 71, Gordon doesn’t have the typical corporate executive background. She spent the first 20 years of her “50-some-year” marriage to Melvin raising their four daughters, while Melvin, 83, has served as chairman of Tootsie Roll since 1962.
Gordon studied at Vassar and Wellesley colleges while starting a family before transferring to Brandeis University, where she first majored in mathematics and then in Russian. She says she always had an interest in linguistics, and that it has helped her with analytic work in business. She attended Harvard graduate school before leaving to join her husband at Tootsie Roll.
“Many years ago, as a housewife, Ellen listened to business skills and became attuned to them and became enamored with business as a career,” says Melvin Gordon. “She’s had a good background by listening to the problems I faced in business.”
In 1978, Ellen Gordon was one of only two women to be elected president of a company on the New York Stock Exchange. In a time when the feminist movement was still gaining steam, Gordon was doing the unthinkable. It was so uncommon that she says she would receive letters addressed to Mr. Ellen Gordon.
“There just weren’t very many women executives — it was very scarce, so it was different,” she says. “People weren’t used to seeing women as executives. I think men weren’t used to having women in their groups, and I think it was an adjustment. It was an adjustment for women, too, and a lot of that is better now, although it is continuing.”
Gordon considers her husband a mentor, someone who was instrumental in her learning process as a businesswoman. But that doesn’t mean the couple always agrees on everything. To resolve disputes, the two negotiate like typical business partners would.
“We’ve had a pact since we began,” says Melvin Gordon. “We don’t do anything until we lobby each other until we come to a consensus.”
Ellen Gordon says that, for the most part, the system works well.
“I’ve done it for so many years that I’m used to it,” she says. “You’ve got to talk it out, persuade each other. The awful thing is he tried to lobby me in the middle of the night at two in the morning.
“He would tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘What do you think of … ‘”
