Philadelphia Project

The idea looked like the hottest thing in the Curtis publishing empire since Cyrus Curtis picked up the Saturday Evening Post for $1,000 in 1897. At least, that's the way it looked to J. Frank Beaman. Beaman tried it out on his boss, Curtis President Walter D. Fuller: Americans love to enjoy themselves, spend billions on their vacations, but have no first-rate magazine to help them enjoy their fun & games.

Fuller told him to put one together. All last year, behind an anonymous office door, Beaman (a financial editor until he became Fuller's secretary eight years ago) labored in secrecy with a small staff. Rumors floated from Independence Square that conservative Curtis would launch a major magazine from scratch for the first time since Mrs. Cyrus Curtis started the Ladies' Home Journal in 1883.

This week Holiday, the first big postwar magazine, hit the stands with a roll of promotional drums, a whopping 450,000 initial circulation.

Leafing through its 124 expensive pages, readers might well feel that Curtis had labored to bring forth (at 50-c- a copy) a monthly Technicolor mouse. There were tricky layouts, eye-filling maps and charts, 33 editorial pages in color.

But many of the lavish spreads looked confusingly like the advertisements they adjoined. And like the old National Geographic, the new Holiday obviously suffered from the same travel restrictions that have kept wanderlustful vacationers homebound. To season his first issue with a dash of global flavor, Editor Beaman bought a rewrite by U.P. Funnyman Frederick C. Othman of his six-day round-the-world flight. Other pieces covered San Francisco, the New Orleans Mardi Gras, the Southwest's cliff-dweller ruins.

By the time it came out, Holiday had its second managing editor. The first, a former publicity man for N.A.M., was fired early. No. 2 is William Morris Laas, 35, onetime managing editor of United Feature Syndicate (Eleanor Roosevelt, Li'l Abner).

Its first Holiday over, Curtis last week was already deep in another postwar project, masterminded by Manhattan Adman Ted Patrick. Its name, if any, was a secret, but not its purpose: to put out a LIFE-like magazine.

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