The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 56

g6 a THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER. WEDNESDAY MORNING. JUNE 3- 1949 CM in the OPOST STRIDE ow Jbi CJ is Mfi r7 bp Remember Norman Rockwell's Post covel of April 23, depicting a rain-threatened game between the Dodgers and the Pirates? Ford Frick, president of the National League, requested the original charcoal sketch, and the cover painting itself now belongs to Baseball's Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, New York. Post renders never overlook a good thing as witnessed by a quarter-page advertisement for a certain household object. In.

st months this small advertisement pulled 3500 rrplirs even though it was not intended draw direct mail orders! inenca The size in square miles won't tell you. The number of people won't tell you. Because the bigness of America is in its spirit. A bigness we've tried to capture in our legends For only those daring and dynamic souls' carved a nation from the wilderness could conceive Paul Bunyan a man gigantic enough to build Pike's Peak, paint the Grand Canyon and form Yosemite Valley a man who covered twenty-four townships in a single stride and raised a dust that didn't settle for months! But even such awesome exploits as those of Paul Bunyan can't fully describe the true bigness of the American spirit. Nor can the tremendous circulation of The Saturday Evening Post fully describe its true greatness.

Certainly, by every current standard, the Post is a big magazine. It enters some four million homes each week. The high calibre of its audience is without equal. But the Post's biggest dimension escapes any ordinary measurement. No figures, no charts can display the affection and respect people have for it, the sincere confidence and belief they have in everything appearing on its pages.

Yet this intangible quality of Post greatness has been clearly demonstrated to America's business leaders. For this is the stimulus that brings people into the retail stores to buy the very products they have seen on the pages of the Post. That is why businessmen place more advertising linage in The Saturday Evening Post than in any other magazine It's a safe bet nobody at the Kremlin openly subscribes to the Post. Yet The Saturday Evening Post does manage te crack the Iron Curtain. In spite of the Moscow ban, some forty copies of the Post slip into Russia each week and, speaking of multiple readership, it is estimated that they are read by soma 100,000 people! One large company has an advertising campaign appearing in eight national magazines.

The copy does not solicit mail-yet has pulled letters by the hundreds! Of the letters referring to a magazine, 50 mentioned the Post more than the combined mentions of the next seven magazines! You don't have to point out to this advertiser that people just naturally pay more attention to his message when it's in the Post! Murder, mystery and mayhem In mammoth department store by one of America's most popular authors I Master storyteller Clarence Budington Kelland has concocted a brand-new adventure yarn for you, beginning in today's Saturday Evening Post. As one of the millions of Kelland fans, you won't want to miss a single thrilling episode of "Stolen Goods." Speaking of Post pulling powrr, a Neut Jersey woman sent in a "Letter to the Editors1' asking other Post readers how to get rid of squirrels in her attic. And ham neighborly advice poured in from all sides! She received dozens of local and long distance phone calls, plus letters from all over the world (including a proposal of marriage). Being a good sport, she tried to answer each letter with a humorous not-until she began to get answers to her an swers! Never again says she! Harassed mothers might well take a rfp from the Virginia woman who swears that her clever tot, aged 2, could name 9335 of all the things advertised in the Post. This should prove a time-consuming pastime for even the most precocious youngster considering that 7,871 advertisements appeared in the Post last year.

That's 1818 more individual advertisements than appeared in Life, 3972 more than appeared in Colliers, and 5630 more than appeared in Look! Dust off that easy chair and settle down to hours of reading pleasure with this week's Post! Packed between Hs covers you'll find two serials, one novelette, four short stories and eight articles. Plus your favorite regular Post features, magnificent illustrations, chucklesome cartoons, and the ever-exciting advertising pages. fl3fi.