When editors were gods

A forgotten magazine for a forgotten audience

Frances Lear’s Lear’s magazine (1988 to 1994) and Myrna Blyth’s More magazine (1998 to 2016) are often cited as pioneering titles for older women, and rightly so. But decades earlier, another magazine also tried to make a go of it, the now-forgotten Tom Breneman’s Magazine.

Breneman was a popular radio host of the day and a particular favorite with the elderly matron demographic. Audience members at his Breakfast in Hollywood show were encouraged to wear wacky hats, which Breneman often tried on himself. (Somehow this seems to have worked on radio.) He also bestowed an orchid corsage and a kiss on the oldest woman present; the record, apparently, was 106.

“I firmly believe that there is a tremendous need for a magazine appealing to the grown-up woman, the more interesting and mature woman who is really the backbone of the country,” Breneman said in announcing the launch. “There is no other magazine on the newsstand today which is dedicated to them. My job is to fill that great need.”

According to Newsweek, the target audience was women age 35[!] to 70.

Breneman also announced that he’d be holding a contest, with $25,000 in cash and other prizes, to come up with a better name for his magazine.

Newspapers reported that the digest-size magazine would “derive much of its editorial content from the popular features of the Breakfast in Hollywood broadcast as well as inspirational pieces on how to get the most out of life through hobbies and fun, mental and spiritual advice and programs for self-improvement.”

The first issue appeared on newsstands in December 1947, dated January 1948 and with Breneman himself on the cover. Among the articles inside: “New Teeth Without Worry,” “Crazy About Canaries,” and “Why Do Women Live Longer Than Men?”

Breneman’s project was not without its skeptics. “What I want to know is who the heck he thinks is going to read it,” wrote Will Jones, a columnist with the Minneapolis Tribune. “I can already see thousands of copies of Tom Breneman’s Magazine growing yellow on the newsstands for want of women who’ll admit they’re old enough to buy it.”

But the magazine seems to have done quite well for a time, reportedly selling some 500,000 copies per issue within its first six months. Breneman, however, wasn’t around to celebrate. He had dropped dead from a heart attack in late April, at age 46.

With Breneman’s unexpected exit, Garry Moore, soon to be a famous TV game show host, was tapped to take over the radio program and edit the magazine. In February 1949, the magazine got a new editor, Ted Malone, a radio personality who had once been poetry editor of Good Housekeeping.

In the meantime, the magazine had also taken on its new name, suggested by Mrs. Jesse Leuvane, the wife of a retired army sergeant and mother of nine from Fort Collins, Colorado. Her $5,000 grand-prize winner: Best Years.

As far as I can tell, Best Years ended its run in 1949, although the name has been revived a time or two for unrelated magazines in the years since.

The editor who might have been a movie star

"George Frazier, the tall, dark and handsome magazine editor, has received a screen offer because Marie (The Body) McDonald told her agent husband about George's long, long eyelashes. He is now known to his intimates as 'The Eyelash.'" — syndicated columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, writing in March 1945.

Frazier, who was Life magazine's entertainment editor at the time, went on to a long, high-profile career as a magazine writer and Boston newspaper columnist, but movie stardom seems to have eluded him.

Frazier died in 1974, at age 63. From what I've read of his work, he seems ripe for rediscovery.

The magazine as one-man show

"A key fact about magazines, unlike newspapers, broadcast networks, and most other corporate forms of information, is that one man can influence every idea, every layout, every word that appears in print." — Clay Felker, best known as the founding editor of New York Magazine, writing in The Antioch Review, 1969.

The editor as rag-picker

"The editor is more eager to get a good story than you are to sell it. Like a rag-picker, he patiently sorts over tons of junk to find something good and useful." — E. Albert Apple, writing in 1918.

Apple seems to have been a modestly successful short-story writer of the era, primarily for mass-market outlets like The American Magazine and The Popular Magazine. He also wrote detective stories under the name A.E. Apple.

 

President quakes at the power of magazines

"Well, a man who has ordinary common sense does not seek the hostility and the continued hostility of an interest as powerful as the magazines. He goes into a fight of this kind only from a sense of duty." — President William Howard Taft, explaining his support for an increase in postal rates for magazines, March 1, 1911. 

A magazine that pushed the envelope for thoughtfulness, 1890

"The manuscripts of contributors to the Century Magazine are always returned in plain envelopes if they are rejected. If they are accepted the notice of acceptance is sent in a Century envelope. In that simple rule is betrayed a degree of thoughtfulness, delicacy and consideration that is not easy to match." — Chattanooga Daily Times, June 29, 1890.

The two ways to edit a magazine

"There are two ways to produce a magazine. You can get a marketing organization to tell you what people want and then edit to meet their needs. Or, you can edit to please yourself, as I do, and hope that enough people share your enthusiasm and concerns to make the magazine a success." — Norman Cousins, longtime editor of The Saturday Review, interviewed in 1972.

Cousins had quit his job the previous fall in a dispute with the magazine's new owners and was at that point preparing to launch his own magazine, to be called World.