The Press: Big Outdoor Man

During the depression, a millionaire walked into the Minneapolis office of a floundering outdoor-sports magazine, and shyly presented a manuscript he had written. The editor sized up the author and the story and bought it for $10. He got a great bargain: before grateful Lumberman M. J. Bell Sr. was through, he had invested more than $50,000 to keep Sports Afield afloat.

Since then, under Bell and President Walter F. Taylor, who ran things even before Bell died last year, Sports Afield has become the biggest of all outdoor monthlies.* Last week it put to bed a November issue that would go to 800,000 customers, a record for its 61 years. Colorful as a hatband full of trout flies, it was filled with picture stories and crackling adventure stuff.

Sports Afield can thank the Saturday Evening Post’s Editor Ben Hibbs for much of its good hunting. Four years ago when the magazine was shopping for a new editor, Hibbs recommended husky Theodore Resting of the Country Gentleman staff who was equally at home in an editor’s chair or the saddle.

When Resting arrived at Sports Afield, $50 was a high price for contributors, and the magazine looked it. Ted Resting raised the rates to as much as $500 for stories and $400 for illustrations. He replaced the shopworn “Me and Joe went fishing” type of story with pieces by such writers as Louis Bromfield, George Sessions Perry and Donald Culross Peattie. He also took off on crusades (a current anti-pollution series is called Running Sores On Our Land), and hired a Washington correspondent to keep up with conservation news and legislation. As circulation rose, so did Ted Resting’s salary; at 32, he gets $25,000 a year and is buying a stock interest (eventually 28%).

* Second: Outdoor Life (circulation: 736,235); third: Field & Stream (660,785).