A Letter From The Publisher, Jun. 2, 1947

Not long ago a retired Westchester County, N.Y., high school principal wrote to F. D. Pratt in response to a letter she had received from him as TIME’S circulation director, asking whether by any chance he was the Francis DeWitt Pratt she had taught in third grade in Schenectady, N.Y. She felt there was something vaguely familiar about his handwriting.

Few readers have known Fran Pratt that long, but they know his signature well. It is, in fact, familiar to so many of TIME Inc.’s readers (he does the same job for LIFE and FORTUNE) that he is forever meeting people for the first time only to hear them say: “Oh, I had a letter from you!” and sometimes add “this morning.”

They may have had many letters from F. D. Pratt—for many different reasons. As circulation director, he has, for instance, the job of letting prospective readers know what TIME is and what it tries to do—as well as telling them and our readers what TIME is doing. When it is time for subscriptions to be renewed, that is Pratt’s job, too. Under his wing also is a newsstand division which sees that the proper number of copies arrive at the proper U.S. newsstands from coast to coast on time for our readers.

Another of his responsibilities is the corps of resident TIME subscription representatives and dealers. He sees that they are kept fully informed about our policies and development for, as most of you know, TIME is and always has been sold on its editorial merit—without benefit of dictionaries, sets of china, and other inducements. Fran Pratt feels that nobody should be persuaded to subscribe to TIME unless he really wants to read it.

As a trustee of Taft School, an active member of several YMCA boards and committees, Fran Pratt has a personal interest in education that exactly fits his additional duties as director of our work with hundreds of schools, colleges and universities, which use TIME’S material for teaching purposes, with clubs and forums using special material for studying and discussing world problems, and with individual requests from educators.

In 1925, when Fran Pratt was graduated from Yale and went to work for General Electric in his home town of Schenectady, the circulation of two-year-old TIME was 75,000. In 1939, when he came to TIME after a hitch at the Harvard Business School and considerable experience in retailing and magazine publishing, our circulation was 750,000. Today, with over 1,500,000 paid circulation in his corner, he could be forgiven for relaxing a bit. But Pratt, who is a ruddy, blue-eyed, eupeptic father of three (two boys, a girl) with an appalling propensity for work (and weekend gardening), has written himself into a culdesac.

Being in communication with so many people, he is the object of a large and enthusiastic response in kind. TIME readers write in just to say they were happy to hear from him; others, on vacation or traveling abroad, send him all sorts of remembrances, from stamps & prints to African tribal drums. One reader, who had some harsh words to say, wrote them down on a two-foot asbestos shingle. Another advised from Australia that his daughter was on her way to attend school in the U.S. and that he could think of no safer escort from dockside to schoolsite than F. D. Pratt. (One of his staff was at the pier in Los Angeles when the young lady arrived.)

As probably the most available member of the Pratt family in America, F. D. is also constantly asked to help locate lost Pratts. He has no idea why so many Pratts lose track of their relatives, but if they are TIME subscribers he can always find them.

Among his most rewarding and faithful correspondents are the servicemen who wrote to him all during the war about TIME’s Pony and other editions they were getting overseas. They deluged him with battle flags, daggers, and other souvenirs of their gratitude. Fran Pratt is rightfully proud of the fact that more than 400,000 of them are now civilian subscribers and newsstand buyers of TIME and that they still write to him.