When editors were gods

R.I.P. Dick Stolley, editor and lawgiver

Richard "Dick" Stolley died on Wednesday (June 16) at age 92. Founding editor of People magazine (1974-   ) and the short-lived Picture Week (1985-1986), Stolley was also renowned in magazineland as the author of Stolley's Law for successful magazine covers.

JFK addresses women’s concerns… to their mostly male magazine editors

On June 14, 1963 President John F. Kennedy met with the editors of seven major women’s magazines to answer questions about “topics the editors felt of greatest concern to their readers, predominantly women,” as the Associated Press reported.

The editors, however, weren’t predominantly women, or even close. In keeping with the custom of the day, in which women’s magazines were typically run by men and nobody in the industry seems to have thought twice about it, the guest list featured:

• John Mack Carter and Mary Harvey, McCall’s
• Robert Stein, Redbook
• Robert Jones, Family Circle
• Robert Atherton, Cosmopolitan
• Wade Nichols and Ray Robinson, Good Housekeeping
• Robert S. Cramer and Mary Buchanan, Parent’s
• Eileen Tighe, Woman’s Day

In other words, seven men and three women.

The magazines, which were said to reach a collective 34 million readers, planned to publish stories on their interviews with the president in their November issues.

To coincide with the articles, Kennedy released a “Statement by the President to American Women Concerning Their Role in Securing World Peace” on Nov. 1.

“I have been asked how women can best translate their concern into effective participation toward preserving peace. As a first step, there is no substitute for information. While the issues may be complex, they are not beyond the understanding of any intelligent person who takes the time to study them,” he reassured the women of 1963. (You can read the whole statement here.)

On Nov. 20, in a speech to Minneapolis advertisers, editor Stein hailed the Kennedy interview, as well as the recent formation of the American Society of Magazine Editors, as breakthroughs in cooperation among magazines.

“For the first time in history, editors have recognized their common goals and purposes and have gotten together to advance them,” he said.

Kennedy, of course, died two days later in Dallas.

One famous editor's dim view of retirement

"The moment an American retires he is no longer interesting to anyone but himself, and the average man who retires is usually a good deal of a bore to himself even." — George Horace Lorimer, longtime editor of The Saturday Evening Post, in a 1919 newspaper interview. Probably the most powerful magazine editor of his day, Lorimer retired in January 1937 and died that October.

The Case of the Tell-Tale Blurb, by Erle Stanley Gardner

"The late George Briggs Jenkins, editor of Top-Notch, and one of the squarest shooters who ever sat in an editorial chair, once told me, 'Gardner, if you really want to know a magazine, don't study the stories, study the blurbs. The stories represent the best the editor has been able to get. The blurbs show what he was hoping to find.'" — Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason, writing in 1938.

Top-Notch was a pulp fiction magazine specializing in sports and adventure tales for men and boys.

The editor: Manufacturer or artist?

"I believe that an editor is a manufacturer. He takes the raw material, the manuscripts, processes them and sells them in different form. I and other editors buy laughter, tears, excitement, thrills and information, and sometimes, I hope, inspiration.... In my moments of intimate self-communion, I think I am an artist, but I am also a magazine man." — Fulton Oursler, editor of Liberty magazine, in a 1941 interview. Oursler died on this day (May 24) in 1952.

Happy 75th (or 76th) birthday to Guideposts

The celebratory issue.

Guideposts magazine announced this week that it will be celebrating "75 years in print" with its upcoming June/July issue. By my count the inspirational magazine is actually turning 76 this year, but I suppose 2020 wasn't much of a year to celebrate.

Founded in 1945 by positive thinker Norman Vincent Peale, Guideposts began as a four-page leaflet and now claims 4.5 million readers. Its current and longtime editor-in- chief is Edward Grinnan.

 

 

John O'Hara's (very bad) advice re: editors

"Once you have finished a story, there's only one way to improve it: tell the editor to go to hell." — Novelist John O'Hara offering advice to fellow writer Jerome Weidman, as quoted in Geoffrey Wolff's 2003 O'Hara biography, "The Art of Burning Bridges."

Oh, those palsy-walsy editors, 1980

"When I was in the magazine business, editors all hated each other; now they're getting palsy-walsy." — the always-quotable Herbert R. Mayes, onetime editor of Good Housekeeping and McCall's, quoted in the New York Daily News in November 1980.

The author who dared threaten an editor!

"Some day soon you're going to be sorry... you'll recognize us... I'm going to finger you... put a contract on you with the New York women's lib groups." — Author Barbara Howar to John Mack Carter, then editor of Ladies' Home Journal, at a 1970 dinner party, as reported by Washington Post columnist Maxine Cheshire.

Cheshire wrote, "There are those at The Ladies Home Journal who blame Washington's Barbara Howar for the magazine's troubles with the women's liberation movement. And she isn't denying it."

"Wasn't it a groovy idea?" Cheshire quoted her as saying.

Specifically, Cheshire was linking Howar to a famous incident on March 18, 1970, when a large crowd of "militant feminists" laid siege to Carter's office for 11 hours, smoked his cigars, and presented their demands, including his resignation.

In addition to many contemporary accounts, the episode is described in some detail in Lenore Hershey's 1983 memoir, "Between the Covers." Hershey was on the scene as Carter's second in command and succeeded him as editor of the Journal several years later. Hershey's successor, Myrna Blyth, writes in her 2004 book, "Spin Sisters," that, "I can tell you, he [Carter] was more worried that they would not let him out of his office for bathroom breaks than anything else."

 

Unsolicited manuscripts: A window on the world beyond New York

"If you cut off unsolicited manuscripts, you cut off a whole area of life that is beyond your control. There are experiences and opinions that you are isolated from, when sitting in an office in New York."  — Robert Stein, editor of Redbook, in a 1963 newspaper interview.

Stein had been asked to comment on The Saturday Evening Post's recent announcement that it would no longer consider unsolicited manuscripts.

Caskie Stinnett, an editor at the Post, said the magazine spent $60,000 a year on a staff to read submissions but "got practically nothing out of it."

Wade Nichols, of Good Housekeeping, said his magazine also got little value from unsolicited manuscripts but considered it "sort of an obligation and a challenge" to look at them.

 

The ideal article, the ideal illustration

"Every human being likes to see himself in reading matter just as he likes to look at himself in the mirror. The ideal article for a magazine would be one in which every reader could find his own name. The ideal illustration would be a group photograph of all the readers so that each reader could take an afternoon off and find himself in the picture." — John M. Siddall, editor of the American Magazine, when asked for the secret of his success by B.C. Forbes, editor of Forbes.

Forbes recalled the quote in a 1923 newspaper article reflecting on Siddall's recent death, which Forbes attributed in large part to overwork.

Though Siddall and his magazine are all but forgotten now, both were household names in their day.

The editor: Hired man or little tin god on wheels?

"I have never had the idea that an editor is ordained by God to try to make his readers over into the mold he thinks they ought to be in. Neither do I believe that he can foist new interests on them with any degree of success. It's his job to find out what his readers really are interested in and then to serve those interests to the best of his ability. The moment he forgets he's just a hired man and starts to be a little tin god on wheels, he'll find that he's riding for a fall." — Merle Crowell, editor of the American Magazine, then a major, mass-circulation title, in a 1928 newspaper interview.

When Crowell died, in 1956, The New York Times described him as "an alert, wiry, and gracious man," and credited him with "developing many of the patterns in popular fiction and articles that caused magazine circulations of that era to reach new peaks."

Crowell left the American Magazine in 1929. ("Exacting, sometimes exhausting, is the job of editing a national magazine," Time magazine explained, in classic Time-ese, reporting on his departure.) He soon became the first public relations director for Rockefeller Center, then going up in midtown Manhattan.

In his 2003 history of Rockefeller Center, "Great Fortune," Daniel Okrent offers a more comical portrait of Crowell in his role as the center's "head cheerleader, drumbeater, minnesinger, and mythmaker. It wasn't that Crowell lied—although he did that often enough—as that he just couldn't shut up. Once the words began to flow, they would continue in a thundering cataract for the thirteen years Crowell presided over a publicity effort that ranks as one of the most effective campaigns since the evangelists wrote their gospels. If you listened to Crowell... the saga of Rockefeller Center had to be the Second Greatest Story Ever Told."

Okrent also credits Crowell with the idea for the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.

Crowell later returned to magazine work and was, at the time if his death, an editor at Reader's Digest.