The Press: Up the Hill

The Saturday Evening Post, oldest U.S. magazine, last week helped its brother celebrate, a birthday. The juvenile monthly Jack and Jill was ten years old. Rummaging through Jack and Jill’s letters column (it draws 18,000 letters a year), the Post collected a piece on “Kids Believe the Darnedest Things.” Some of the things they believe: that bird dogs fly, that “juvenile” means bad and “delinquent” means children, that Lincoln’s address was Gettysburg, that when it rains it rains all over, and that radios are inhabited by entertaining little people who ought to be applauded and occasionally fed—right through the speaker.

Jack and Jill* had earned its birthday party, and the Post’s plug. Curtis Publishing Co., which launched Jack and Jill as an experiment, then withdrew it from the newsstands during the war to save paper, had watched its mail circulation rise to nearly 500,000 (including 220 in Braille). Beginning with the anniversary issue, Jack and Jill will be back on the newsstands (at 25¢).

The adless magazine is still run by its first editor. When Curtis asked friendly, tousled Mrs. Ada Campbell Rose, 47, to survey the children’s field, she was a textbook editor and housewife with two sons. Impressed by her report, Curtis asked her to edit a magazine for moppets.

Ada Rose shuns name authors (“children don’t care who wrote the story”), never mixes fantasy with fact (“some authors have brownies explain about stalagmites; they think it helps the children, but it confuses them”). She is careful not to tell her readers what to think (“we tell them how to make some gadget, but we never say it’s fun”). Above all, she never slants her pieces to please parents or teachers because “there are more kids [than teachers]; that’s our whole policy.”

*Many an oldster still complains that the U.S. has lacked a classic youth’s magazine since the death of St. Nicholas (peak circ. 100,000) in 1939 and Youth’s Companion (500,000) in 1929. But the best of the late, lamented St. Nick, edited by Historian Henry Steele Commager, will be published this month by Random House.