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in pencil in top margin: Diggles, Joe handwritten note at top of page Feb 9 '69 Dear Jack -I just finished Admiral Morison's double underline: "John Paul Jones". He arrow to "John Paul Jones' is our Mini-Nelson. R.I.P. - JCD Newspaper clipping PANORAMA--CHICAGO DAILY NEWS, FEBRUARY 8, 1969 drawing of magazine cover THE SATURDAY EVE POST MARCH 9, 20 5c showing seated man holding a copy of POST signed J Downs The last great years of the Post Looking back without anger, editor Ben Hibbs remembers the glories of a proud magazine By HOKE NORRIS

  italicized paragraph  The Saturday Evening Post dies today.  The sentence of death was passed back on Jan. 10, but such is the process of publishing - once the issue of a magazine has entered the cycle it is unstoppable and irreversible - that it had to stay alive, though doomed, for four more weeks.  Actually, however, the old and once venerable Post had been living for years on transfusion, transplant and artificial respiration - on borrowed time.  The sentence was a formality.

  THE EDITOR of the Saturday Evening Post during its last era of prosperity was Ben Hibbs.  He retired in 1961, at the end of 20 years in the editorial chair, an lives now in a colonnaded, three-story house of Pennsylvania field stone in the low hills west of Philadelphia, 15 minutes by commuter train from the Post's old headquarters onIndependence Square.
   One day recently -- while the final officers and owners were at last deciding that the Post should become one with Liberty and Collier's --- Hibbs talked at some length about the Post of the earlier days, about its great editor George Horace Lorimer, and about his own editorship.
  All about him were reminders  of those happier years:  Originals of Post covers, portraits of former President Eisenhower (Hibbs, as a senior editor for the Reader's Digest, now edits Eisenhower's manuscripts and assists him in his writing);  Post cartoons; books that were extracted from Post stories and, on one wall in his downstairs study, a testimonial to his editorship, a placard stating that the circulation of his last issue of the magazine was 7,085,000, the highest in the magazine's history and twice the circulation of his first number, in early 1942.
   HIBBS AT 67 is spare, ruddy, active, deliberate in his speech, his manner still touched by the American freshness and innocence of the Kansas plains where he was born and raised.
   As a newspaperman he became known as the most quoted "young squirt" in Kansas journalism, and it was probably this local eminence that set him  on the path to national fame.  He moved to Philadelphia in 1929 as an associate editor of the Country Gentlemen.  He became it s editor in 1940.
   AS a magazine man, then, Hibbs grew up in the quiet, polite, almost courtly environment of Philadelphia and "The Gray Lady of Independence Square," long before the new management moved the office to New York.
   The Post in those years was big, though it had once been small.
    When Lorimer became its editor, its circulation was less than 3,000, its annual advertising revenue less than $7,000.  But in 1902 the figures were 314,671 and $360,175; in 1927 they were 2,816,391 and $53,144,987.  A late 1929 issue of the Post ran to 272 pages and weighed nearly two pounds, all for five cents (the scrap paper dealers bought it on the newsstands and sold it at a profit).
 THE STORY, in other words, was a success story of the sort Lorimer liked to publish.   In the early days of the century he did publish some unexpected people on unexpected subjects --  Clarence Darrow on the open shop, Capt. Joseph Medill Patterson defending socialism, Leon Trotsky explaining the Russian Revolution -- even though Lorimer's philosophy was conservative Republican.  But he was in tune with his times -- as Hibbs said the other day -- the times of boom, expansion, faith in the everlasting durability and blessing of unleashed free enterprise and the undoubted preeminence of America and Americans among nations and people.
   At the same time, however, Lorimer published an entertaining magazine.  His fiction was written by some fo the most eminent American writers, serious and light--O. Henry, Jack London, Ring Lardner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Booth Tarkington, Thomas Wolfe, Gertrude Stein, to mention a few.  "Lorimer was a brilliant editor," Hibbs said, "and he had the ability to spot a good writer....When you look over the writers he discovered and built up and brought along and made vary famous, it's simply astonishing ... The other big Curtis publication was the Ladies' Home Journal, which had an equally strong editor in Edward Bok...I think the dominance of Curtis publications in those years can be ascribed to those two great editors, plus the fact that the man who stared the company and built it, old Cyrus H. K. Curtis, believed implicitly that you must "give an editor his head, let him do the very best job he could and not interfere."
   BUT TWO THINGS happened to Lorimer and the Post --Depression and Roosevelt--and Lorimer never got over them; the Post suffered acutely before Hibbs and his staff resuscitated it.  Lorimer's policy became harshly anti-New Deal;  he opposed all the reforms; in 1936, his magazine even published an article advocating child labor.   Some Post numbers in the spring of 1930 went over 200 pages each, before the crash caught up with it, but in the summer of 1931 they were below 100, in 1932 below 60.  Lorimer and his Post had lost touch.
   Lorimer's successor, Wesley W. Stout, who changed none of Lorimer's formula, was out in 1942, and Hibbs in.
   What Hibbs accomplished has been summarized by Joseph Goulden, in "The Curtis Caper," a history of the Curtis publications.  Referring to both Hibbs and the editors of the Ladies' Home Journal, Bruce and Beatrice Gould, Goulden wrote the the "established a cordial, affectionate rapport with (Curstis' [sic] ) reason for existence, the American readers."
   HOW HAD Hibbs and his staff done it?
   "Oh," he said, "there were so many things in the picture.  In the first place, I think that in those days I had a sort of God-given instinct for what people liked to read.  That's an egotistic thing to say, but I did have -- perhaps because I was one of the people, I was a poor kid, had to work my way through college and so on--I had a feeling, I think, for what interested the great middle-class of America, and I had a very deep feeling about America itself.   My wife always said I have an American flag tattooed on my chest.
 "AS TO HOW we brought the Post back...One of the early things we did was to cut the length of stuff.  The second was to modernize the magazine, make it look more up-to-date than it had been.   We didn't throw out the good things, as they did later on.   They threw out our cover artists, people like Norman Rockwell, that people loved.
  "I always believed deeply in the proper balance in a magazine.  sure, we published a lot of escape reading, (Clarence Buddington Kelland and Erle Stanley Gardner, for instance.  However, I always felt that there had to be a backbone of important material in the Post, to make it a magazine of significance.  We worked very hard at that.
  "Of course I came in in the early days of the war, and the war dominated the magazine for the next 3½  years."  (Among the Post's war corresspondents  [sic] were such writers as as [sic] Edgar Snow, Richard Tregaskis, MacKinlay Kantor and C. S. Forester, and some of its fiction during the Hibbs era was written by Stephen Vincent Benet, John P. Marquand, William  Faulkner and the like, in addition to its "popular" writers).  "After the war we branched out into all sorts of things to keep this backbone of important information and important opinion in...Part of it, too, was just hard work.  I always brought home a briefcase full of manuscripts.  I read, I suppose, every week two or three times as much as appeared in the magazine.  But we did it; we got the Post healthy again.
   "IT'S BEEN SAID I ran a conservative magazine.  All right.  I'm what Ike and I call middle-of-the-road conservative, a little bit to the right of the middle.  My political philosophy dominated our editorial page, but it did not dominate the rest of the magazine...We did keep the thing wide open to a wide gamut of opinion...I knew Norman Thomas rather well, but that was a little too far left.  We never did have any sacred cows, with the exception of the matter of decency.  I always believed that the Post was a family magazine that would lie on the people's reading tables and I didn't want to put something in there that a 12-year-old kid couldn't read with his mother's approval.  We published some very startlingly plain articles on important subjects, but we did it in a decent way."  (Among the Post's subjects were the population explosion and birth control, and the civil rights movement.)
  SPEAKING OF     12-year-old boys -- they used to sell the Post, didn't they?  To what extent did the magazine depend on them?
  "It was a relatively minor thing," Hibbs said.  "The big thing was subscriptions and next in line were the newsstand sales....But it was a wonderful public relations gimmick.  Those appealing kids!  And even today I get letters from successful men saying, 'I sold the Post when I was a boy.'  We had to end the boys' sales operation in the early years of World War II...We could get the kids, but we couldn't get the adult organizers and the cars and the gasoline, and so we had to throw those copies on the newsstand.   They were quickly absorbed.
  "But it was hard on the kids.  I remember getting a letter from one of those boys.  He identified himself as a 12-year-old Post salesman.  I think Papa helped him write it.  He said, 'I notice that the Post quite occasionally publishes articles in behalf of the small business man.  I am a small businessman and you've just put me out of business.' "
   In the early days the kids and the newsstands sold he Post for five cents a copy, and it was even cheaper by subscription.  Wasn't that virtually giving it away?
  "You're so right," Hibbs said.  "This is one of the things in which I could preach you a sermon, on the screwy economics  of the magazine business.  Today they're getting more of the revenue out of the readers.  (The final number of the Post will cost you 50 cents on the newsstand).  But in my day, the theory was that you published a magazine at considerably less than it cost you, thereby building a huge circulation that appealed to advertisers.  You hoped to get most of  your revenue out of advertising.  For the 20 years I was editor of the Post it worked beautifully.
  "THEN THE TIME came when the advertising agencies--you know advertising agencies are sheep, a few of the big ones start doing something and they all start running in the same direction -- some of the big advertising agencies decided that the Post was no longer what in advertising jargon they call the hot book.  In the meantime, television had come into the picture and taken a great big slice of the advertising pie.  So things got a little skimpy in the advertising field, and they got more skimpy in my last year, and since then you know what's happened."
   What had happened, perhaps, was that all America had changed, Lorimer's era was an era of heroes, wasn't it -- Lindbergh, Babe Ruth?
   "Yes.  Something's happened to the heroes these days.  There don't seem to be any more of them."  (Higgs said in a speech once, "For in those other days there were giants...")
  BUT MORE SPECIFICALLY  -- was the passing of the Post like the passing of Collier's in 1957?  Hibbs once said that "editorial independence to a large extent went down the drain at  the house of Crowell long years before the final collapse of the publications themselves...Someone from the business office was always looking over their shoulders.  Things often were done editorially solely to attract advertising -- always a vain procedure and in the end usually a fatal mistake..."  Did something of the sort happen to the Post after 1961?
  "Can't you say," Hibbs said, "that I smiled and said, 'No comment?' "
   He did smile, and he did not comment.