End of Yank

After three and a half years in service, Yank last week got its honorable discharge. Its Manhattan HQ was emptying; its final issue (dated Dec. 28) was on the way to presses in eight countries. Its circulation, once 2.6 million in 16 editions, was down to 1.2 million and dropping fast as the Army dwindled. Two-thirds of its staff was discharged, and the rest could hardly wait to get out.

The Yankees were stepping into good jobs. Highest stepper was dark, barrel-chested, 30-year-old ex-Sergeant Joe McChester Carthy, Yank's managing editor for three years. Before the war he was a $40-a-week Boston sportswriter, later a racetrack pressagent. Recently he was offered and took a $26,000-a-year job as an editor of Hearst's Cosmopolitan.

Sergeant Marion (See Here, Private) Hargrove, whose best-selling book made him perhaps the richest alumnus of Yank, signed up for a lecture tour, plans to write another book. Cartoonist George Baker's crude, snafued Sad Sack, who had been syndicated to 60 civilian newspapers, was about to become a civilian himself. Some of the Yanks and their neighbors on the daily Stars & Stripes were getting together on a new magazine, to be named Salute--a word presumably unpleasing to a G.I. ear. Among the Saluters: Cartoonist Bill ("Up Front") Mauldin, New Yorker Staffman Walter Bernstein, Playwright Irwin Shaw.

Yet to be seen: whether the G.I. staff would produce such latterday giants as the Stars & Stripes' Class of '18: F.P.A., Steve Early, Grantland Rice, the New Yorker's Harold Ross, the late Alexander Woollcott.

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