Nowadays on Main Street

Three giant Sunday supplements blanket U.S. newsstands and front porches every week. But the blanket is full of holes; for small dailies and weeklies there is no mass-produced American Weekly, This Week or Parade. Last week a new supplement got ready to cover these journalistic bare spots. Nowadays, which will start in the fall, has already signed up 305 Midwest papers with a total circulation of 824,000.

The young man behind Nowadays has never held a newspaper job, but he has newspapering in his blood. Gangling (6 ft. 4 in.) K. (for Knowlton) Lyman Ames, 28, is a grandson of the famed Knowlton ("Snake") Ames who played football for Princeton in the '90s and later founded Chicago's Journal of Commerce. While studying at Stanford, "Bud" Ames was struck by the fact that most small-towners, who have lots of time to read, get no magazine sections in their newspapers. Later, as a publications officer for Yank magazine, he spent his spare hours plotting and planning a new kind of supplement.

When Bud got out of the Army in 1946, his uncle John Ames, publisher of the Journal of Commerce, helped him line up $400,000 worth of backing from such well-heeled Chicagoans as ex-Vice President Charles G. Dawes, a Cudahy and three Armours.

Bud Ames laid out $15,000 for surveys on the saving, spending and reading habits of the people who live along Midwestern Main Streets, in towns of 25,000 & under. This gave him plenty of ammunition to lay siege to advertisers. His editorial staff will be small, and lean heavily on outside "name" writers on science, sports, foreign affairs. Small-town business and travel stories--and plenty of recipes--will provide the local touch.

"This is not going to be any American Weekly with bare women and big microbes all over the place," said Ames. "We're going to try to do substantial and factual reporting."

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