Yank

The world's potentially biggest tabloid (circulation: a military secret) was born last week. Name: Yank. Weight: 24 ad-less pages. Price: 5-c-. Father: the U.S. Army. Like its famed predecessor, World War I's Stars & Stripes, it is edited "solely and exclusively for us in the ranks and for nobody else." Its managing editor is a 23-year-old private who reputedly talks back to sergeants, Bill Richardson, ex-Sunday editor of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Picture-minded Yank's first issue was breezy but less lighthearted than Stars & Stripes. Typical ingredients:

> A page of army-life cartoons and a new comic strip called "G. I. Joe" by Corporal Dave (Private Breger) Breger.

> A well-written piece on desert warfare by Corporal Harry Brown, ex-New Yorker staffman.

> A full-page head of smiling Cinemactress Jane Randolph.

> A story called "Learn to Fight Dirty." (To dispose of an enemy sentry, "jump on his back, reach both arms around his neck and shove a foot against the back of his knee. The impact is guaranteed to double him up like a jackknife and if you twist at the same time you'll sever his spinal cord.")

Yank will have an official chaperon in Lieut. Colonel Egbert White, former vice president of the big ad agency of Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, ex-staffman of Stars & Stripes.

To keep their ears to the barrack rooms, Yank staffmen will be rotated "back to camp" from its head office in Manhattan. Yank correspondents will follow the combat units, fight when necessary, rate as fighting men, not correspondents, if captured. Says Executive Editor Captain Hartzell Spence, ex-U.P. promotion manager and author of One Foot in Heaven: "Suppose one of our reporters goes along on a Commando raid. If he comes back we've got a great story. If he doesn't come back we've got a casualty."

Only disturbing rumor (about which the staff was evasive in its denials): that for fear of offending mothers and antagonizing wives, Yank will print no cheesecake.

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