Human Interest
On the lighter side, This Week ran a profile of a 19-year old Chicagoan, Eugene Gilbert, who had founded and ran a pioneering nationwide market research enterprise that focused on teenagers. Gilbert relied on the “Joe Guns” (i.e. big shots) on high school campuses to conduct his surveys, which revealed, according to the article, that teens of the day were relatively conservative in their tastes, looking mostly for comfort, durability and modest prices. While they had a strong knowledge of company slogans, they did not necessarily buy into them. Gilbert’s company put out a weekly newsletter “Teen Trends,” and also offered to write “groovy copy” for clients.
In “24 Hour Actor” Jack Sher and John Keating profiled Robert Walker, then starring in the movie “The Sailor Takes a Wife.” According to the article, Walker had the Bohemian actor act down pat, meeting the journalists at the Waldorf-Astoria in heavy-rimmed glasses and clothes that would have been suitable for a Greenwich Village poet, except that they actually fit. They rode in a studio-supplied limousine to “21,” described in the article as a “high-priced mess hall frequented by movie stars, bank presidents, jockeys and other people with large bankrolls” where table-hopping was a sport. Young autograph seekers mobbed Walker at the door, missing the entrance of actress Paulette Goddard who arrived on foot, which the writers found odd. Walker told the reporters he was sick of playing 19 and 20 year-olds and yearned for meatier roles.
Writer Bruce Marshall, the Scottish-born author of the novel The World, the Flesh and Father Smith contributed a front of the piece essay “I Should Have Said.” Marshall, like many who took a lead role in Catholic apologetics in mid-20th century, was a convert whose fiction and non-fiction often was based on Catholic themes. Religiosity in the mainstream media at the time generally had a Catholic spin. In his essay, Marshall wrote pompously about hearing a story over dinner about a soldier who had been taken on a tour of an ancient church. When the soldier’s guide told him that the candle in the sanctuary had been burning miraculously for 1,000 years, the soldier blew it out. Marshall’s companions found the story hilarious. Marshall wished he had told them that the soldier could never extinguish the faith that the candle represented.
“Dear Sir: You Cur,” excerpted from William Allen White’s posthumously published Autobiography, a Book of the Month Club selection and Pulitzer Prize winner, recounted the celebrated newspaper editor’s encounter with an irate reader back in Emporia, Kansas, in the late 19th century.
This Week also profiled a “cash man” at auctions in the Pennsylvania Dutch country. Whatever didn’t sell he got, often for a penny, for resale.
A photo feature focused on M. Fluegelman, Inc., a manufacturer of top hats, which the article said were out of style but still called for at some formal functions,
In “Easter Parade” Jane Joslin wrote that magazine editors were inundated with submissions at holiday time with Easter being second only to Christmas, providing some examples of the odder or more endearing of the Easter photos she had received.
“Joker in the Sky” was a brief piece on ball lightning.
Weekly back-of- the-book features included “Sidelines,” a collection of jokey anecdotes; a puzzle section and “Quiz-em,” a quiz on current events.