American Weekly
In his 1951 memoir, Nothing's Sacred on Sundays, Emile C. Schurmacher presents an interesting look at the editorial offices of American Weekly in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The weekly supplement, which boasted the largest circulation in the nation, was located in the Mirror building on East 45th Street where various other Hearst enterprises, including thr tabloid Mirror, the King Feature Syndicate and the International News Service also were headquartered. Schurmacher, who had traveled the world as a freelance journalist after his graduation from Columbia, reported that his family, who lived at the time on East 94th, was mortified that he would take a job with such a notorious scandal sheet. Later a left- leaning, aspiring actress on whom he had a crush was disgusted by his employment.
Editor Morrill Goddard, who headed the publication from 1896 to 1937 and was reputed to be the highest-paid print journalist in America with a healthy six figure salary, refused to have any women working in the office during his tenure, even at the switchboard or as clerical support. The office consequently had a frat house atmosphere with the boys cooking up chili and pasta on electric burners, swigging drinks from flasks kept in their desk drawer and even shampooing each other’s hair. They would trade ribald stories and swear heavily and kept porn at their desk. After work they met for drinks at Costello’s on 44th and Third Avenue or showed off their female companions of the evening to their peers at The Palm, aka as the Palms, more of an Italian restaurant back then than the renowned steakhouse it would become.
Things changed at the offices in 1940 with the institution of the draft. Goddard’s successor, Abraham Merritt, still known today for his speculative fiction by connoisseurs of the genre, reluctantly hired the publication’s first female copy “boys” to replace two young men who were among the first to be called up by Selective Service. Merritt also toned down the sensationalism and added women’s interest features. Schurmacher, who wrote that he knew absolutely nothing about food or cooking, ate mostly at the counter at diners and “coffee pots,” and cooked little that didn’t come straight from a can, was appointed the food expert against his protests. He insisted on an assistant and was given a race track fanatic whose job was to plow through the recipes submitted by readers to pick the weekly winners. Supposedly he was to enlist his wife’s help but, as Schurmacher told the story, he devised a system to pick the winners based on the horses running at the track that week. Unfortunately he also was not very accurate at transcription, leading to the printing of inedible recipes such as the one that called for several pounds of sage. In time Merritt offered up his own wife, an accomplished cook, as Schurmacher’s assistant.
By 1946 Merritt and Schumacher were both gone and the magazine was under the command of longtime Hearst henchman Walter Howey, who had been the main man at a string of his boss’s newspapers, including The Mirror, renowned as one of the most read and least respected newspapers in the country. Howey, according to Time, was the man that Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur had in mind when they created Walter Burns, the editor who would stop at nothing to get a story, in their stage play and film adaptation Front Page. However under Howey, American Weekly became more conventional, reflective perhaps more of the times than of its editor.
That week the American Weekly carried a mix of coverage of celebrities, crime, scientific breakthroughs and service features. The educational crisis and religion also was the topic of articles. A mainstay of the magazine were short paragraphs on odd news. Reflecting the middle income status of most of its readers the ads were mostly for items like mouthwash, cigarette lighters, subscription purchases of the Funk & Wagnall Encyclopedia , Ovaltine, Kraft cheese, Jell-o and chewing gum..