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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 happeed to Lorimer and the Post --Depression and Roosevelt--and Lorimer never got