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Show ALL DUNN by Roy Dunn HOWDY FOLKS I don't know if you have c en missed it, but since February 8th, the Saturday Evening Post is no more. It had been around since 1821, and that's quite a spell. I miss having the magazine around for I have always enjoyed en-joyed the tales of Courtney Riley Ri-ley Cooper which, to me, were always thrilling. And do you remember the lost treasure stories of C. E. Scroggins? And how about the troubles of the sales department of the Earthworm Earth-worm Tractor Company and Octovus Roy Cohen stories and Will McFee and his sea stories and Scattergood Bain-es Bain-es with his hardware store, and how he acted as the town advisor ad-visor to all who would ask his advice. And do you remember Mary Roberts Rinehart and all the others in the glowing pages of the Saturday Evening Post? And now that magazine has dropped completely out of sight, and this comes as somewhat some-what of a shock to a lot of people for the "Post" was as American as ham and eggs. I have probably left out some of the best of the writers who wrote for the "Post," but those of us who can remember the America of small towns and heroes around the depot or the corner grocery store, will have our own memories. When I was a kid I must have walked as many miles as a postman, knocking on doors every week, selling the "Post" for a nickle, for which I had paid three cents. There has never been a bigger bargain since, and a kid with a lot of patience and good legs could make himself a half a buck of real spending money, every week. There was a time when the "Post" claimed to have been founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1728, but it was decided in 1942 that a loose connection with Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette wasn't enough to substantiate sub-stantiate the claim. But it was strong enough anyway and survived sur-vived such publications as Colliers, Col-liers, the Literary Digest, the Youths Companion and the American Am-erican Boy lots of them that once had fascinating fiction and features. Those of us who remember the "Post" in its heyday will not soon forget the covers by Norman Rockwell'' and the folksy fiction of Booth Tark-ington. Tark-ington. I think it was Upton Sinclair who once described the Saturday evening Post as "standardized as soda crackers" crack-ers" which was it's secret charm. Several years ago the editors of the "Post" tried to catch up with mod times but the old flavor of the magazine had been gone for some time. And the streamling, changing styles and innovations never helped one bit. As a fifty-cent multicolor multi-color slick paper magazine, it became less popular all the time and when gasping for breath, it became a bi-weekly. It finally vanished from the American scene on February 8th. One can't say that an era had ended, because that era had already ended. I shall miss receiving rejection re-jection slips from them for I had saved almost enough to paper pa-per the bedroom. Now that they have gone out of business, I'll have to panel one wall and paper the other three. I'm sure I have plenty of their rejection slips for three of the walls. But I can't rake up much sympathy for them because during the time they hired a bunch of wonder boys to save their magazine, these characters charac-ters sat down in their think tank and come up with a doozy. They mailed me a notice that they would not accept any more unsolicited manuscripts. If they wasn't smart enough to recognize real talent when they saw it, they wasn't any smarter than the editors who turned it over to them. They couldn't recognize genius either. But seriously, I hated to see it go. A part of America is fading fad-ing into legend. SEE Y'ALL LATER. |