A Punch for Parade

The five-year-old Sunday supplement Parade was the first of Marshall Field's newspaper ventures to show a profit. Last winter, aiming to keep it showing, Field went shopping for a topflight adman. At Crowell-Collier Publishing Co. he found his man: red-haired Arthur H. Motley, 46, onetime Fuller brushman, who had done wonders as publisher of the American Magazine. To help "Red" Motley make up his mind, Field offered to share Parade's ownership with him.

Last week Parade made another raid on the Crowell-Collier reservation. This time Publisher Motley, looking for a new editor, grabbed 33-year-old Ken W. Purdy from his job as editor of Crowell's long-projected international picture magazine. Purdy was tired of waiting for his bosses to decide when to launch their complicated, multilingual project.

A graduate of Click, Look and the Annenberg Radio Digest, Purdy edited OWI's wartime propagandistic Victory (nine languages, more than 1,000,000 circ.). His job at Parade will be to put some punch into the not-so-bad, not-so-good pictorial while foghorn-voiced Red Motley puts some ads into it.

Housecleaning, the Easy Way. So far, in Motley's regime, Parade has made a healthy circulation gain from 2,100,000 to 3,650,000. But it has taken a terrible beating in advertising--while its competitors, Hearst's American Weekly (circ. 8,804,881) and This Week (8,281,339) have stayed almost as fat as ever. Cause: a poorly timed 60% boost in rates, announced before Motley's arrival.

Last week Red Motley preferred to look at the brighter side. "We've cleaned house as far as advertisers are concerned," he boomed. "We've thrown the truss boys, kidney-pill artists and goiter-curers out of the sheet, and have replaced them with such Class A advertisers as General Foods, Arm & Hammer and Sunshine Biscuits." (Last week's Parade also had a lurid full-page ad for a book bargain, Bachelor's Quarters and One of Cleopatra's Nights.)

In the future, the Sunday supplement will vary its picture-story routine with articles aimed to please all 21 of the publishers who buy it. "We've found that human interest stories of ordinary people do a swell job of selling America to the Americans," says Motley. "We take a trainman, or a milkman. Show how he lives, what he eats, where he works, his hobbies. It's not heavy. But by & large it shows that people like their homes, their jobs, the companies they work for. We're doing it the easy way. We tell it in the guy's own words. Why, one man actually told our reporter, 'Every time the whistle blows at the Bayway plant, I get down on my knees and thank God. for the Standard Oil Company.' "

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