Ralph Hoar: Celebrating a Legacy
30 Years of Public Service

Ralph W. Hoar, Jr., for more than three decades a campaigner for automobile, product and environmental safety, died on September 21, 2001, at Virginia Hospital Center due to complications from prostate cancer. He was 56.

A self-styled “product safety researcher with an attitude,” Hoar was president of Ralph Hoar & Associates, an Arlington-based product safety research firm he founded in 1988 and leveraged into an effective Internet-savvy nationwide resource for safety advocates on product, workplace and environmental issues.

As an outspoken critic of corporate behavior, especially among auto manufacturers, Hoar was widely sought in recent years for comment by national and international journalists whenever product-safety was in the headlines.  Following the death of England’s Princess Diana, CNN broadcast worldwide an interview with Hoar about the crash that killed her.

By turns, Hoar lobbied Congress, waged media campaigns, researched and published investigative studies, created coalitions and provided intelligence and other support for high-profile lawsuits against the manufacturers of products determined to be hazardously defective.

Among his firm’s earliest services to attorneys and consumer product safety advocates was building a worldwide network that became the preeminent importer of trial exhibits for product liability litigation.  Hoar’s network and experience cut time and expense for attorneys seeking information or exhibits.  He located, documented, and arranged international shipment, customs clearance and nationwide transportation for products from Europe, Australia, Asia and Africa for display in American trials.

A Detroit Free Press profile of him in 1996 described Hoar and his “crew of mostly young, tenacious researchers” as believing “they are on a mission to make manufacturers build products that don’t hurt or kill people.  To that end they ferret out a product’s flaws as fodder for product-liability and class-action lawsuits pressed by Hoar’s clients.  What they uncover from public court and federal safety-investigation files, or from friendly insiders, Hoar often shares with newspaper and TV reporters free in hopes that they’ll publish stories.”

“Public awareness,” Hoar told the Free Press in describing a major part of his strategy for success, “is one of the most powerful sources of creative tension in a democracy.”

Earlier in his career, Hoar neither attained nor sought the public visibility of other consumer advocates, such as Ralph Nader.  Automotive News in 1994 called Hoar “an anomaly among auto safety advocates” and credited him with “avoid(ing) the high-profile, confrontational tactics of some safety advocates.”

“I’ve got no interest in being some kind of nationally recognized safety authority,” he told the auto industry magazine in 1994.

However, his behind-the-scenes strategy shifted somewhat two years later when Hoar launched Safetyforum Research and Safetyforum.com to leverage the Internet in support of his firm’s expanding transportation safety activities, specializing in researching, defining, articulating, and aggressively pursuing solutions to significant public health hazards.

While maintaining primary interest in transportation-related issues, Safetyforum.com rapidly expanded its focus to include other consumer products, medical malpractice, environmental hazards, workplace injuries and hazardous practices.  It investigated and publicized public health issues ranging from factory farming’s pollution of waterways with animal waste to toxic waste at abandoned U.S. military bases, the hazards of amusement park roller coasters and other “thrill” rides, nursing home practices, managed health care and high-stacking of merchandise in warehouse superstores.

“The Internet is a powerful, interactive tool for discovering, gathering information and, in turn, educating a broader public about hazards associated with hazardous products and practices,” Hoar wrote in describing his web site’s purpose. “Safetyforum.com believes that knowledge without appropriate action is of little value.  We empower people and organizations to take action for safer products and practices.  We focus media and public attention on product safety litigation and litigators who specialize in holding service providers and manufacturers accountable when they cause injury.”

The web site now counts 20,000 visitors a day, including journalists, U.S. Government officials and both U.S. and international businesses, attorneys and consumers.

Hoar created Safetyforum.com to be unique among for-profit research organizations.  “When our research reveals hazards to public health and safety,” he wrote, “we feel the public has a right to know consistent with the needs of our individual clients.  We routinely work with other organizations and public policy makers to achieve results that benefit our clients and the public.

“Our goal is to harness the power of the Internet for a safer, saner world.  Trial lawyers get to tell about the good work they do.  Citizens are provided with a forum to voice their opinion.  They are educated on the need for continued vigilance against products and practices that cause harm.  And if they need help, they learn where they can get it.”

Hoar’s firm and Safetyforum.com were instrumental in most of the 1990s’ major campaigns to secure recalls of vehicles demonstrated to be unsafe and to force safety design improvements in automotive and other products ranging from minivan door latches to child safety seats:  Nissan’s 1994 repurchase of more than 30,000 fire-prone minivans, the first such buy-back in vehicle history; the 1995 recall to correct defective rear-lift gate latches on 4.5 million Chrysler minivans; the 1996 recall and correction of 8.9 million Fords found to have fire-prone ignition switches, and Ford’s recent recall of 13 million Firestone Wilderness All-Terrain tires.

“Safetyforum’s work on the Ford-Firestone story illustrates the vital role that the Internet will play in any future public debate centering around consumer safety-related issues,” C. Tab Turner of North Little Rock, Arkansas, a leading plaintiffs’ attorney in the Ford SUV tire-explosion cases, recently wrote his colleagues.  “The Internet has revolutionized communication and Safetyforum.com is on the cutting edge of using the Internet as a tool to reveal hazardous products and practices.

“The tools available at Safetyforum.com allow us to better define and direct public debate, provide us with the opportunity to force recalcitrant manufacturers to come forth with honest information about their products, and help level the playing field in terms of providing consumers with important safety-related information.”

Hoar was credited by consumer advocate Ralph Nader with assembling a list that showed “how extensive (is the) leap to the industry side” by former regulatory employees of NHTSA.  “Meanwhile, Ralph Hoar continues to do well and do good,” Nader wrote in 1998, “exposing NHTSA’s foibles and failures and getting pro-consumer information out to the country.”

“The team at Safetyforum.com and Safetyforum Research is honored to take up Ralph’s unique vision to fearlessly champion safer products and practices through the Internet.  It is his legacy to all of us, and we pledge to continue the good work he began,” said Lee Jones, Executive Director of Safetyforum.com.

Hoar was born in Williamsburg, Virginia, on July 13, 1945, the son of the late Ralph W. Hoar Sr. and Margaret Meadows Hoar. A graduate of James Blair High School and High Point College, he served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam from 1968 to 1969.

Following military service, Hoar began his career in automobile safety in 1969 at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), where he worked with world-renowned epidemiologist William Haddon, Jr., M.D., a pioneer in vehicle crashworthiness.  Hoar edited the IIHS Status Report, which he described to the Detroit Free Press years later as a “scrappy sheet that raised hell.”

In 1977, Hoar became the nation's first registered lobbyist for airbags, directing the National Committee for Automobile Crash Protection, a coalition of more than 60 organizations that led the successful drive to secure a congressional mandate for regulations requiring passive restraints in passenger vehicles, devices now widely credited with saving thousands of lives annually. Hoar continued to pursue improvements to make airbags even safer when they were found to be hazardous to children, pregnant women and small persons.

Hoar has served as a consultant to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), the U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), the National Bureau of Standards, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, CBS News, ABC News, and several network television magazine shows, including “20/20” and “60 Minutes.” He has written and edited numerous articles and reports on a wide range of motor vehicle safety issues.

Behind the public facade of a serious-minded advocate and media strategist, however, lurked an aspiring poet with a flair for the flamboyant, prone to raise eyebrows by his dress as much as by his wry humor.  In 1985, in a poem to his son called “Facets,” he wrote that life “is a diamond” one should approach like a cutter, taking “care that each facet is true.”  He wrote:  “And when this journey ends / The diamond that was your life / Will last forever.” 

"Ralph was a loving father, devoted friend, and touched and changed many lives." In addition to his mother, he is survived by his partner, Russwin N. Francisco; his son, Jason Hoar Stryker and daughter-in-law Jorie L. Stryker; his daughter, Adrienne E. Hoar; the mother of his children, Patsy J. Hemp; and two brothers, James C. Hoar and Robert "Wayne" Hoar.