Press: End of Lorimer

After 38 years of rigorous, one-man editing of the Satevepost George Horace Lorimer was tired when he resigned Jan. 1. Said he quietly: “I should like to live a more leisurely life and put into effect some long deferred plans.” Last week at his home in Philadelphia’s suburban, wooded Wyncote, death overtook the 69-year-old editor in his quest for leisure. He had been ill with pneumonia a week.

Leisure had never been Editor Lorimer’s lot. When in 1898 successful Ladies’ Home Journal publisher Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis paid $1,000 for the Satevepost (circulation: 1,800) it was a dull little rehash of British journals. Yale-educated young Lorimer, a modestly paid 30-year-old reporter on the Boston Post and only three years out of Armour & Co.’s Chicago glue works, heard of the purchase, hastily wired Cyrus Curtis, was hired as literary editor at $40 a week. He became full-fledged chief after a few weeks, threw out the shears and pastepot. For the next four decades, from nine to five he bustled in action at Independence Square, went home to dinner with a parcel of manuscripts under his arm, read them until late hours. He shunned public appearances, social life.

It was while he was with Armour, whose founder, Philip Danforth Armour, a parishioner of his father’s, had promised to make George Lorimer a millionaire, that he gained the experience which enabled him to select the conservative articles on business, the personal experiences and success stories for which Satevepost became famous. When he had trouble getting the material he wanted, Editor Lorimer wrote it himself, among his best efforts being the shrewd and practical Letters of a Self-Made Merchant to His Son. Contemptuous of things highbrow, Editor Lorimer developed the current commercial, snapper-ending short-story technique. By 1908 Editor Lorimer’s magazine had passed 1,000,000 circulation. In the peak of 1929 prosperity Satevepost bounded over 3,000,000, sold $50,000,000 in advertising.

By 1933 Satevepost advertising revenue had fallen below $18,000,000, and although “nonpartisan, but never neutral” had been a strict Lorimer policy, the New Deal brought out his Republican individualism. In 1934 his ordinarily innocuous editorial page began to sputter and fume about “Who is Going to Pay?”, “Roads to Nowhere.” But Satevepost profits, unlike those of many other New Deal haters, surged ahead. Publisher Curtis had turned over Satevepost and Curtis Publishing Co. in its entirety to Mr. Lorimer in 1932, and when Lorimer retired at the beginning of this year he left the Curtis house well in order.

While he had not become a millionaire meat packer, Mr. Lorimer had wielded profound influence as one of America’s most important editorial figures, had long drawn a $100,000 salary.