The Press: Expanding Circle

When housewives sauntered out of Piggly-Wiggly, Sanitary and Daniel Reeves grocery stores last September they tucked under their elbows, between the string beans and the meat, a copy of Family Circle. No blatant booster-sheet touting special brands or stores, Family Circle was an interesting, smartly-edited little weekly about food, cinema, radio, fashions and cosmetics which the stores thought enough of to give to their customers each week. It had a circulation of 300,000, was beginning to pull fan letters at the rate of several hundred a week. Last week Family Circle proudly announced that six more store chains had subscribed: Safeway, MacMarr and Pay’n-Takit in the Middle West and Pacific Coast, First National in New England, American Stores in the Middle Atlantic, Southern Stores in Florida. Beginning Oct. 1 the circulation of Family Circle will catapult to more than 1,000,000.

Founder and editor of Family Circle is small, spry, Georgia-born Harry Evans, onetime managing editor of Life, still its cinema critic. He writes the editorials, the radio column, the cinema reviews for Family Circle, prides himself on keeping his gossip clean. Editor Evans’ chain-store clients are so convinced that Family Circle attracts customers that they pay the production and delivery costs (it is printed in Manhattan).

What makes Family Circle different from most U. S. house organs is first, Harry Evans, and second, the fact that it pays homage to no advertiser. Not a line of product-boosting ever gets into the magazine. When it does, says Editor Evans, he is through.