Tales Out of Sunday School

"Dear Friend and Gentle Hearts." With these last scribbled words of Stephen Foster* as a salutation, Fulton Oursler, onetime professional magician, veteran magazine editor and top writer of mysteries and a bestselling religious book (The Greatest Story Ever Told), last week began a syndicated column which big city newspapers were playing like an important story. The point of Oursler's first weekly column was that the Christian spirit has temporal rewards.

After reciting the Biblical story of the man who "once entertained certain strangers in his house, and . . . did not find out until after they [left] that they were messengers of God . . .", Oursler drew a modern parallel. He told how George C. Boldt, a Philadelphia hotel man, once surrendered his own room to an elderly stranger and his wife, two years later had the kindness repaid when the stranger (William Waldorf Astor) made him manager of Manhattan's new Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

New Trend. "Modern Parables," as Oursler, a convert to Roman Catholicism, calls his tales out of Sunday School, were selling fast; the Cowles-owned Register & Tribune syndicate had already signed up 75 newspapers. Two other syndicates will soon distribute similar "inspirational" columns by two other bestselling religious authors. For a weekly sermon on such subjects as "The Philosophy of Pleasure" by Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen (Peace of Soul), the George Matthew Adams syndicate has lined up 25 newspapers. For the Rev. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale (A Guide to Confident Living), the Post-Hall syndicate has signed 34 newspapers.

Newspaper editors had spotted a trend. A little belatedly, they had found that the book trade's success with religious titles was no fluke, but the result of insecurity and searching for faith in a war-torn world.

Top News. Except at Easter and Christmas, most newspapers have generally kept religion stories on the "church news" page, a dull collection of building-fund reports, warmed-over sermons and church-supper notes surrounded by profitable church ads. These pages sound the same week after week, bore editors as much as they do most readers. But last Easter, editors who ran Oursler's Greatest Story got a surprise; readers were so interested that circulation jumped 5,000 to 10,000 on several papers. The Chicago Daily News started the Greatest Story on Page One, kept it there under news headlines for 40 days.

To capitalize on the "religious trend," the syndicates serialized the Peale and Sheen books, found readers still calling for more. Some papers, e.g., the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, were planning to run one of the new columns in a top spot on Page One. Said Executive Editor Basil L. ("Stuffy") Walters of the Chicago Daily News last week: "People would have laughed you out of town if you had run that kind of stuff in the '203."

*When Composer Foster died in a Bellevue charity ward in Manhattan in 1864, he left 38-c- and a scrap of paper bearing the five words, apparently the title for a new (and never written) song.

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