In Chicago recently, a group of the TIME staff gathered ostensibly to drink a toast to John McLatchie, TIME'S new advertising sales director. Actually, it was a surprise party staged to honor one of the Chicago office's advertising salesmen. Frank McDonald, on the 25th anniversary of his coming to TIME.

Since McDonald's career spans most of TIME'S history, I would like to tell you something about this veteran salesman.

McDonald joined TIME'S sales staff on Jan. 1, 1929, six years after TIME first appeared. "In those days," he remembers, "all too frequently a TIME salesman would send in his name to the front office and the question would come back:

'TiME? What city is that newspaper printed in?' We had to be a sort of walking encyclopedia. TIME was so new and so many people were curious about it. They brought up such questions as, 'Does one man write the whole magazine?' 'Will TIME ever reach the half-million circulation mark?' "

McDonald continued answering questions and selling advertising. In one year, for example, his accounts totaled 220 pages of ads. A number of companies which first began their national advertising through McDonald and TIME are still with the magazine.

Says Frank: "The greatest kick I've had in this career of selling TIME is the creative work that goes into starting a company in its first national advertising and seeing that company grow and prosper." Another satisfaction: "The fact that we call on and work with such a diversity of businesses. We may be talking to a heavy industrialist on one call, a food manufacturer on the next, and then go to a clothing or insurance man. The result is that one must have a knowledge about sales, advertising and distribution problems of all kinds of businesses."

McDonald found his career after trying several other things first. At the outbreak of World War I. he enlisted with the 9th Ambulance Company of the American Red Cross to drive for the French. After the U.S. entered the war, he transferred to the aviation section of the Signal Corps, eventually earned his wings, but too late to do any combat flying.

After his discharge, McDonald enrolled at the University of Chicago. "G.I.s were a strange breed of cats on the campus in those days. All I really got out of college was a wife and a fraternity pin (Delta Kappa Epsilon). I still have the wife." In this restless postwar period, he decided to be a coal miner, went to Colorado where he was first a digger, then a pump man, was soon eligible to take the state board exams for the job of mine superintendent. When he discovered that even if he passed he would still have to spend a number of years underground, McDonald gave up mining for a surface job in Illinois selling washing machines and vacuum cleaners. He left this field in favor of selling cookies, then started his own business as a manufacturer's agent in radio parts.

"Those were the days," McDonald recalls, "when everyone was making his own set." To stimulate interest, McDonald and a partner built a portable broadcasting station and barnstormed small Midwest towns. It was during this venture that Frank McDonald first became an ad salesman. At each stop they would round up local talent for a program, then sell advertising time to the merchants. "I remember one show we put on in Sycamore, Illinois," he says. "I was the announcer. The local township orchestra was directed by a girl named Florence Wollensock, and I made the mistake of calling her 'Cot-tonsock' several times. The soloist on the same show was a girl named Lulu Clutter, and the accordionist was Charlie Pittlecow. If that wasn't an announcer's nightmare!"

McDonald signed off his radio career when customers and money began running out. He signed as a junior space salesman for the McGraw-Hill Publishing Co. three months before McGraw-Hill dropped all junior space salesmen. A little later he joined the office of Powers & Stone, publishers' representatives for a dozen small newspapers and three magazines: Arkansas Farmer, Screenland and TIME.

Says he: "It soon became apparent that TIME was the one to put the effort on." And that is what Frank McDonald has been doing ever since.

Cordially yours,

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