Lorimer Out

Last week in the oak-paneled board room of Philadelphia's Curtis Publishing Co. the directors gathered to hear a grave piece of news. After nearly 39 years, the company's most famed employe was quitting. Reason was that, at 68, George Horace Lorimer felt it was time to turn from the chairmanship of Curtis' board to his own affairs, from the editorship of the Saturday Evening Post to his own writing.

When George Horace Lorimer began to work for Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis in 1898, the Satevepost had a scant 1,800 readers. Under the Lorimer editorship, the Post's circulation was to pass 2,900,000, its revenues $52,300,000. In 1929, a 272-page Post bent the newsstands of the land. In that same year, Mr. Lorimer's salary was $133,399. Depression lowered the great advertising medium's income. Last year saw Satevepost advertising again on the upswing. The magazine took in $22,045,333.50, paid Mr. Lorimer $100,000 for editing it. As the second largest individual stockholder in the com pany, Mr. Lorimer has been unquestioned boss of all Curtis publications (Saturday Evening Post, Country Gentleman, Ladies' Home Journal), since old Mr. Curtis' death in 1933.

To succeed squarejawed, hardworking, conservative Mr. Lorimer, the Curtis directors ratified the retiring editor's own choice of a squarejawed, hardworking, conservative colleague, Wesley Winans Stout, a 47-year-old Kansan. Curtis' President Walter Dean Fuller was delighted to announce that Mr. Stout shared Mr. Lorimer's beliefs in "fundamental American doctrines." A graduate of the Kansas City Star, Wesley Winans Stout has been one of the Post's associates for twelve years, has written and ghost-written many an article. Last week he set out on a motor trip with his wife for a brief vacation before slipping his solid, substantial and Republican person into George Horace Lorimer's editorial chair before the first of the year.

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