"Let's Go To Church"

"ONCE AGAIN--AN APATHETIC WORLD

LOOKS ON

WHILST TWO GREAT PEOPLES FLY AT EACH OTHER'S THROATS. . . . Seven thousand miles away Chinamen are dying. Seven thousand miles away Japs are lying on hospital cots--their broken bodies wracked with torture from shrapnel fragments and machine gun lead. ...

They are real people. They love--they laugh. They have codes of honor. They enjoy life just as do we. They have babies. They have their worries and their joys. . . . TOMORROW--Let's go to church and pray for them. Let's pray God to stop the march of that dread monster WAR."

Last week readers of the daily Press and Union of Atlantic City, N. J. perused such advertisements, noted that "the sponsors of this message" included Atlantic City Gas Co.; Freund Brothers, Opticians; Shill Rolling Chair Co.; West Side Lumber Co.; Brooks & Idler, Printers. Atlantic City citizens had seen a succession of such ads, but the author of them remained anonymous. He, the only "Go-To-Church Editor" of a U. S. daily, was Robert Earl Peifer. display advertising manager of the two newspaper?.

Many U. S. newspapers get local businessmen to sponsor church advertising, sometimes using art work and canned sermonets or thoughts-for-the-week. As chairman of trustees of Atlantic City's Olivet Presbyterian Church, it occurred to Adman Peifer last year that such advertising is dull indeed. He asked local clergymen to try their hands at ad-writing, soon, concluded that "their stuff just didn't have the right slant. They couldn't write a good ad." Last January Adman Peifer, 51 and hardworking, began writing institutional ads for the churches of Atlantic City, turning out swift-moving, unpretentious copy about people who play hooky from church, who set their children a bad example, who mistakenly consider churchgoing a mid-Victorian custom, who consider their salvation less important than the fact that it is too hot or too cold to go out on Sunday morning. Adman Peifer graduated to "Go-To-Church Editor'' when, in an ad attacking the pursuit of pleasure, he solicited names of anyone in need of "the sheltering arm of the church." Atlantic City merchants gladly signed up at $2.75 apiece per week to have their names appear as sponsors of Mr. Peifer's thoughts.

Particularly proud when he gets off something like last week's assault on War, Adman Peifer says: "A slumbering fire of religion exists in almost everyone's makeup, but you cannot fan it into flames with copy that smacks of the church."

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