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What very popular American magazine links its history to Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette? You’re never going to get this, so I’ll tell you.

  The Saturday Evening Post.

The age of the magazine will surprise you. It was first published in 1821. And it used the same printing shop at 53 Market Street in Philadelphia where Franklin’s gazette was published.

The owner of the Ladies’ Home Journal, Cyrus H.K. Curtis, bought the fledgling Post for $1000 in 1897. Under his ownership, the magazine grew to become the most widely circulated weekly magazine in the United States. Much of its popularity was due to the forty-year leadership of its editor, George Lorimer. From 1920 through the 1960s, the Post was one of the most influential magazines among the American middle class, with fiction, non-fiction, cartoons and features that reached two million homes every week.

Each issue featured several original short stories and often included an installment of a serial which appeared in successive issues. Most of the fiction was written by popular writers. The opening pages of the stories featured paintings by leading magazine illustrators and poetry by famous poets was included. Even Jack London’s best known novel The Call of the Wild was first published in serialized form in 1903.

Publication in the magazine launched careers and helped artists and writers to stay afloat. P.G. Wodehouse confessed, “The wolf was always at my door,” until the Post gave him his first break in 1915 by serializing Something New.

The Post was published weekly from 1897 to 1963. During the 1960s, however, the magazine’s readership began to decline. In 1969, it folded. Then two years later it was revived as a quarterly publication with, surprisingly, an emphasis on medical articles. Currently it is published six times a year with a smaller overall format.

But, let’s look back. Who among us can forget the human interest pieces, the illustrations, the reader’s letter column, the poetry and the gag cartoons? Even now when one of us hears the name “Hazel,” our thoughts immediately flip back to Ted Key’s audacious, out-spoken maid who never held her thoughts in check while fervently emphasizing them with a whirl and shake of her feather duster.

Furthermore, the cover illustrations were so excellent that they are still popular today as posters and prints. You’re not a thoroughbred American if you don’t know the name Norman Rockwell as his art will forevermore be iconic Americana.

It was a sad day for all of us when the Post began to lose its popularity. The cause could be blamed on television which competed for advertisers’ and readers’ attentions. The public’s taste in fiction was also changing along with its conservative politics that appealed to fewer and fewer people. Prominent authors also began drifting away to newer magazines that offered more money and status.

William Emerson began as editor-in-chief of the new format in 1965 and remained in that position until the magazine’s demise in 1969. By then, a specialist in troubled firms, Martin Ackerman, stepped in as president of the Curtis Publishing Company after he lent the business $5 million. Although it was still in dire financial straits, Ackerman made the bold move to reduce printing costs by canceling the subscriptions of nearly half of its readers. In exchange, he gave them free subscriptions to Life Magazine. For this questionable boost to their readership, Life paid Curtis $5 million, with the hope of easing the company’s mounting debts.

The move was also widely seen as an opportunity for Curtis to abandon older and more rural readers who were less financially linked to the Post’s advertisers. But even these cut throat (and some would say heartless) tactics didn’t save the magazine. The February 1969 issue turned out to be its last. By then it had lost $5 million in 1968 and would lose a projected $3 million in 1969. The only good thing was that every employee received the promise that the Post would help them find a new job.

But, the magazine didn’t stay dead for long. Indianapolis industrialist, Beurt SerVaas, relaunched it in 1971 as a quarterly magazine. He claimed it would revive itself as a nostalgic magazine. Then twelve years later, it changed again with its core focus being health and medicine. Now, years later, the Post’s range of topics are not only broad, but suitable for the general public … including (thank goodness) the aged and the country folk!

As of 2018, the complete archive of the magazine is available online.

I would be amiss, however, if I were to finish this column without another mention of America’s beloved Norman Rockwell. His illustrations of the American family, as well as life from a rural bygone era, became icons as familiar to us today as the first time we saw them on the Post covers.

In 1916, Rockwell was discovered by a Post editor. At that time he was an unknown 22-year-old New York City artist. The magazine promptly purchased two illustrations from Rockwell and used them as covers. They were so successful, three more pieces were immediately ordered. These would turn into a fifty-year career with the Post, in which Rockwell produced more than 300 covers!

You may be interested in learning that the Post also employed a Nebraska artist, John Philip Falter. In time he became known as “a painter of Americana with an accent on the Middle West.” Falter brought out some of the homeliness and humor of Middle Western town and home life. Between 1943 and 1968, he produced 120 covers, ceasing only when the magazine began displaying photographs on its covers.

I am now a subscriber to the “new” Post. I will freely admit that my heart still skips a beat when I see it in my mailbox. Even today it brings back the nostalgia of the 1950s. There were six in my family who all wanted their turn at reading it first. This was obviously an impossibility, so we all sort of, kind of patiently/impatiently awaited our turn. In those days the magazine was a large publication and I remember having trouble keeping it on my short lap.

And then there was Hazel … that Hazel! … who always came as a shock to me as I couldn’t imagine anyone being so cocksure of herself. Our mothers would have set us straight in no short order if we kids had dared to say any of Hazel’s outrageous outbursts. We couldn’t have pulled them off anyway, because not only did we not dare to do so, but none of us owned a feather duster!