Girl for the Gazette

Oh my search will never cease For the girl on the Police Gazette. For the pretty young brunette On the pink Police Gazette.*

This week the 104-year-old Gazette, now a pale, thin shade of its once fat and enormously profitable self, got a new girl. Unlike the heroine of Irving Berlin's hit of the '30s, she was no brunette chorus cutie to adorn its cover, but a long-legged, thirtyish blonde newshen to be its boss.

In seven years as a sportwriter on the New York Journal-American, Hearstling Jeane Hoffman has covered everything from a frog-jumping contest to the World Series and the Belmont Stakes. ("I'm so tall," she says, "I have to interview jockeys sitting down.") In between, hard-boiled Reporter Hoffman found time to toss off some sport features for the Gazette. In naming her executive editor, Publisher Harold H. Roswell gave her orders to try to recapture the Gazette's bygone glories as the "sportsmen's bible."

Bartenders & Barbers. It would take a lot of doing. In the Police Gazette's heyday under Publisher Richard Kyle Fox, who made a fortune in his 45 years as owner (1877-1922), the weekly magazine had a circulation of almost 500,000 and a readership in the millions. No well-appointed barbershop, saloon or Army post could afford to be without the Gazette.

Bandit Jesse James was one of the pink-paper Gazette's well-known subscribers until his death in 1882 (duly noted in the Gazette), but sedate family men also ate up the weekly's authoritative sport news and lurid stories of "horrid murders, outrageous robberies . . . vulgar seductions," under such titillating or shocking headlines as SNARED BY A SCOUNDREL. AN INNOCENT COUNTRY BEAUTY or ROAST MAN (on a hotel fire). Promotion-wise Publisher Fox sponsored John L. Sullivan's bare-knuckled heavyweight bouts of the '80s, also gave championship belts and medals to rat catchers, oyster openers, bartenders and barbers.

Bobbed Hair & Bare Facts. But Prohibition (1920) dried up the Police Gazette's barroom circulation, and in 1922 it lost most of its barbershop trade when women invaded man's next-to-last retreat from womankind to have their hair bobbed. In 1932, ten years after Fox's death, the Police Gazette folded. Revived by Mrs. Merle Williams Hersey, a Methodist minister's daughter, as a magazine frankly and exclusively devoted to sex. the Gazette was sold in 1935 to Publisher Roswell. When the Post Office suspended his mailing privileges in 1942 for one year for "obscenity," Roswell cleaned up the Gazette a bit. New Editor Hoffman plans to give the monthly magazine another scrubbing, replace "Bare Facts About Burlesque" with more bare facts about sport.

* Copyright, 1935, Irving Berlin TIME, OCTOBER 17, 1949

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