The Press: Man on a Rocket

The first “magazine of world astronautics” is whooshing off the presses this week. Its title: Missiles and Rockets. As the latest in a fleet of eight air-age trade journals launched by American Aviation’s chubby, ruddy Editor-Publisher Wayne Parrish, 49, the magazine will take off with a burst of specialized stories; e.g., a roundup on Russian rocket development, a story of the Army’s rush to beat the Navy into space with a satellite.

Fittingly, Publisher Parrish claims a speed record for Missiles and Rockets: only 90 days from the decision to produce it to the appearance of its 152-page first issue, with 85 pages of advertising. As he awaited the first press run (17,000 copies) of the 75¢ monthly, he crowed: “It’s a success already. Our entire investment [$52,000] will be written off by the end of this year.”

Star Reporter. Parrish’s zest for speed and foreign places has probably made him the world’s most traveled publisher and his own star reporter. He has logged 900,000 airline miles in 70 countries.

Wayne Parrish was the first Western newsman to confirm that the Russians had converted their TU-104, the Tupolev medium jet bomber, into a commercial air transport. From Moscow last winter he was the first to report on how the Russians were trying to raise their airline standards to qualify for international competition. In 1953 he scored a beat with details of West Germany’s plans to revive Lufthansa, the German airline. In 1954. after the fiasco of the British Comet jetliners, he created a sensation in Britain by reporting that BOAC had contracted to buy U.S. Douglas DC-7s instead of British aircraft. Early in World War II it was Parrish who learned that a shortage of B-17 bomber spare parts was about to cause a cutback in bomber production: his story jogged the War Production Board into quick action.

The urge to travel hit Parrish early. By the time he graduated from high school in his native Decatur, Ill., he had hitchhiked through all the Eastern and Southern states. He thumbed his way to New York to study at the Columbia University School of Journalism, where he won a Pulitzer fellowship that gave him a year of third-class travel from the Arctic Circle to Spanish Morocco.

“I love to move.” says Parrish. “In New York I set out to walk up and down every avenue and across every side street in Manhattan. I never finished, but I covered a good deal of it. I also set out to travel every mile of the subway, but I never finished that either. But I have traveled in every state in the U.S. and visited every state capital.” Parrish’s current goal is to land at every U.S. airport served by a scheduled airline. His score: 505, with 75 to go.

Passport Problem. As a professional newsman. Parrish was fired from three jobs, “and never was happy until I became my own boss.” The New York Herald ‘Tribune’s City Editor Stanley

Walker fired him in 1933 after four years of reporting because Parrish ducked a dull assignment. In 1935 an economy wave washed him off the staff of the Literary Digest. Then he got a job as editor of National Aeronautics, even though “I knew nothing about magazines and nothing about aviation.” In 1937 he lost that job when his boss got the word that he was dickering with the magazine’s printers to join him in starting a new magazine. Two and a half hours later he and the printers, E. J. Stackpole Jr. and A. H. Stackpole of Harrisburg. Pa., agreed to start American Aviation on $5,000 capital. Since then. Parrish’s expanding publishing enterprises—American Aviation Daily, Official Airline Guide, Who’s Who in World Aviation, etc.—have moved four times into larger Washington, D.C. headquarters, set up five other U.S. offices. With Parrish holding almost two-thirds of its stock, the company grossed $2,000,000 last year, expects to hit $3,000,000 in 1956.

But footloose Publisher Parrish spends little time enjoying his new $175,000 home in northwest Washington, finds it more rewarding to write his chatty fortnightly column. “En Route,” from all points of the compass. “I was looking at myself the other day.” said he. “I was wearing an English hat and shoes, a Peruvian shirt, an Italian tie, and a topcoat I bought in Hong Kong. That can only happen to you in the air age. I’ve got only one problem—a small one. I’m the only man in the U.S. who has to ask his wife for a passport.” Mrs. Parrish, known professionally as Frances Knight, chief of the passport division at the State Department, has not yet pulled her official strings to keep her husband at home.