THE SATURDAY EVENING POST

IN those days, Americans had home towns. A boy was born in his father's house in Charlottesville, Va., or Ambler, Pa., or Scott City, Kans.; and that's where he grew up. He wore short pants until he was twelve, then went downtown on the streetcar with his mother to get his first pair of knickers. Automobiles were still symbols of success; a dad with an Apperson 8 or a Pierce-Arrow or a Hupmobile was forgiven if he showed off a bit by taking the family for a Sunday drive. Radios were primitive; sales of Atwater Kents and RCA Radiolas only began to climb when magazine ads of the '20s proclaimed that "the thrill of radio is no longer in getting 50 stations in a night, for radio has now conquered distance and turns to music."

Thursdays were always special. After school, youngsters hitched heavy canvas bags over their shoulders and set out through sycamore-shaded streets. They crisscrossed the broad lawns in front of white frame houses, tossing parcels from their bags up under porch swings and wicker chairs on the wide, front verandas. Then screen doors would squeak and bang, and children would squabble over who would carry them inside. A new issue of the Saturday Evening Post had arrived.

The Post was intended for weekend reading, but nobody waited that long. Dad plunged right into one of Ring Lardner's You Know Me, Al baseball stories. As soon as she could get the magazine away from him, Mom settled comfortably with a mystery serial by Mary Roberts Rinehart, which inevitably began, "Had I but known. . ." The kids giggled at Little Lulu's cartoon antics. And of course everybody could enjoy the latest Scattergood Baines episode or grin wryly at the gas-station attendant on the cover -- absentmindedly ogling a pretty woman driver while the gas tank he has filled overflows.

"The great American nickelodeon," Will Rogers called the Post. During the early decades of the century, it brought humor, sentiment, pragmatic soothsaying and a touch of romance into millions of households. In smaller towns, especially, it was the prime medium of family entertainment. But it was more. In its pages, readers saw reflections of themselves--or, at least, reflections of what they liked to think of themselves. The Post's greatest editor, George Horace Lorimer, insisted that "editors must be ordinary men"; and it was the values of ordinary men--cozy domesticity, a sense of humor, a belief in decency and common sense, a faith in free enterprise--that the magazine sought to express. It distilled an almost mythic vision of small-town America that many of its readers were still living and others were already nostalgic about. It made even sophisticates realize, with a pleasant pang, that they were partly Penrods at heart.

Benny the Bum. Myths endure, but their purveyors do not. Last week, after a century and a half of continuous publication, the Post came to an end. Readership had remained high in recent years, but costs rose higher and advertising revenues went down. Largely because of the Post's problems, the parent Curtis Publishing Co. had lost $62 million since 1961. The Post figured to cut its deficit from $5,000,000 last year to $3,000,000 in 1969, but hopes of regaining advertisers remained dim. The Curtis board of directors, bowing to the inevitable, gathered in New York City and decreed death for the magazine after its Feb. 8 issue.

Over the years, the Post had proved so durable that it seemed death might never come. Oldtime editors rather liked the notion that the magazine was the direct descendant of a publication founded by Benjamin Franklin, even though they knew the claim was flawed.* Irreverently they nicknamed a Franklin bust in the editorial offices "Benny the Bum." Much more real were the roles of Cyrus H. K. Curtis, a self-made promotional genius from Maine, who bought the dying little paper in 1897 ($100 cash, $900 later), and Curtis' editor for 38 years, George Lorimer.

Under Curtis' exuberant, free-spending management, the Post grew up with the century. It was the expansive age of oil and railroad fortunes and of Horatio Alger; young, middle-class men everywhere were ambitious, eager to make money. The Post captured their readership with such articles as "How I Made My First Thousand Dollars" and with the masculine fiction of Kipling, Bret Harte and Jack London.

Flapping Galoshes. Lorimer made fiction king, and fiction writers princes. There was something close to divine right in Irvin S. Cobb's tone when he remarked, "The uncanny soundness of its literary judgment is demonstrated firstly by the fact that more people on this planet read the magazine and like it than any other magazine. And secondly by the fact that it buys nearly everything I write." F. Scott Fitzgerald walked the Post's cork-floored editorial corridors, his galoshes flapping, selling the short stories that kept him living high between books.

The Post published Kenneth Roberts and Stephen Vincent Benet, Agatha Christie and Erie Stanley Gardner, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Norman Raine's Tugboat Annie eternally beat rival Captain Bullwinkle to salvage jobs in Puget Sound; C. S. Forester's Midshipman (or Captain, or Commodore) Hornblower managed to leave himself in such parlous plight at the end of each installment that Post readers could not wait to get at next week's issue. Lorimer paid beautifully: $6,000 for a short story, $60,000 for a serial.

As a result, countless young reporters, would-be lady novelists, daydreaming clerks and other aspiring writers around the country yearned to "make the Post." In the mid-'20s, unsolicited manuscripts poured in at the rate of 2,000 a week, and had to be carted into "readers' " offices in big wicker baskets. Most could be dismissed with a scan of the first few pages, but editors had to watch for glued and upside-down pages farther on --writers' tricks to detect unread pieces.

"Uh--Uh Painting." Lorimer could be petty, as when he bought a story by a staffer but withheld the news from him for a few days because "he suffers so good." But he also commanded the grand manner. Recalls former Post Editor and Writer W. Thornton ("Pete") Martin: "He used to have a tailor come in and take his measurements right in the office. And he used to take a trip to Europe every year and come back loaded down with Oriental rugs, Chippendale furniture and tapestries. He'd have them all uncrated in the Post hallways for all the editors to see. He was a giant."

When a gawky young illustrator arrived at the Post one day bearing a large rectangle draped in black velvet, a staffer asked what he had. "It's uh--it's uh painting," he stammered. Indeed it was; the Post had found Norman Rockwell. Over the next 45 years, his hundreds of sentimental but sharply observed cover paintings--boy scouts and barbershops, April-fool jokes and baseball games--would come to represent the essence of the Post itself.

Not So Nimble. It seemed that the glory days would never end. By 1940, circulation had climbed close to 3,000,000. The Post had become almost as hallowed a symbol of the American way as the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, its neighbors across Philadelphia's Independence Square. With the outbreak of World War II, the country--and the Post--took on a more serious air. Ben Hibbs, a former Kansas newspaperman and editor of Country Gentleman, who took over the Post in 1942, deployed a staff of crack war correspondents. He also changed the fiction-nonfiction ration from 70-30 to 30-70, shortened the articles, and struck a crisp, bright tone throughout. But when postwar American society and American journalism began changing, the Post was not so nimble as it needed to be.

In the 1950s, the Post suffered a severe attack of television, which in a single electronic flash pre-emoted the role of family entertainer. Whittaker Chambers' "I Was the Witness" and Veteran Pete Martin's "I Call On" interviews with celebrities set alltime records for newsstand sales, and circulation grew to 6,000,000; but it was a lowest-common-denominator readership. Advertisers lost faith in the Post audience and moved their accounts to TV or to more modern or specialized publications.

Too Late. Though on its knees, the Post did not succumb without a struggle for new life. In 1962, Curtis directors found a new president in Matthew J. Culligan, a dashing former advertising man who had reversed the skidding revenues of NBC's Today show. Culligan hired and fired, wheeled and dealed, and managed to shore up Curtis' finances for a while. He installed Clay Blair Jr. as editor in chief of the Post; Blair's "sophisticated muckraking" changed the character of the magazine and made for lively reading, but it also led to at least six libel suits. The Post's last hope was 36-year-old Corporation Lawyer Martin Ackerman, whose 1962 merger of four firms to create Perfect Film & Chemical Corp. showed his knack for healing sick companies.

The sad irony of the Post's final nine months under Ackerman is that many of the desperate new departures it had made by that time were improvements. It had oriented itself to more cutting issues, achieved a more youthful flair, and introduced more thoughtful content. But all this came too late. The Post's frenzy of rejuvenation was really a dance of death, and those close to the magazine knew it. The end, said Editor-at-Large Harold Martin, was "like being told that a relative had died after a long incurable illness. There is a certain feeling of relief that there won't be any more suffering."

* Franklin bought--but did not found--the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1729. The Gazette's only connection with the Post is that it expired in 1815 in the same print shop where the Post was launched six years later.

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