A LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER

When Cartoonist Al Capp began introducing his readers to LIME--"the magazine with a flavor"--we asked Capp to tell us a little more about the new publication and how it got its name. In the words of the characters who populate his improbable county of Dogpatch (not to be confused with those who live in his even less probable country of Lower Slobbovia), he assured us: "It warn't no accident."

It seems that LIME's crew-cut correspondent was assigned to cover the annual Sadie Hawkins Day race--a sunup-to-sundown open season on bachelors not fleet enough to evade the local spinsters. This painful adventure was Capp's idea of tender treatment for a magazine he had come to regard as an old friend. Says Capp: "Gee whiz, you've been so sweet to me over the years, it's sort of like kicking Santa Claus."

Some day, however, says Capp, he will be unable to restrain himself from giving TIME (or LIME, whose slogan is, "If you can't read it--eat it!") the full treatment which is customary in his comic strip, Li'l Abner. Says he: "I'm surprised I haven't done a thorough job on it before, because it's a setup the whole country is familiar with." Then he adds with a thoughtful air: "I will inevitably do a complete massacre. The only way I can do a thorough job is with the gloves off. It's so easy to make a mortal enemy if you run a comic strip."

Capp says he has been a devoted TIME-reader for a long time and has been a subscriber "probably forever." Having been the subject of a number of TIME stories, he has come to know a number of our researchers. "I'm a great admirer of the TIME researcher," he says, "and I must have seen dozens of them. They're a most eager and sort of nice kind of girl. They believe that what they're doing is important."

If Capp is ever realty brutal with the benighted staff members of LIME magazine, it will be at least partly because of his own experiences as a TIME cover subject (Nov. 6, 1950). "For years I felt very badly that TIME had been doing covers of Joe DiMaggio, Churchill, Eisenhower, but not me. A couple of years ago, I was in Sardi's and [Columnist] Leonard Lyons stopped by my table. He said: 'You ought to be on the cover of TIME.' I agreed that he was inspired. So he dragged me right over to [TIME Senior Editor] Joe Purtell, who was in the room at the time, and said: 'Capp ought to be on the cover of TIME.' I just stood there dying, but Purtell agreed it was a good idea."

Shortly after that, the Capp cover was scheduled and Associate Editor Paul O'Neil was assigned to write it. O'Neil, a good listener, frightened Capp at first. Says Capp: "All he would do was grunt for two days. Then he warmed up. I felt he was my friend. But the unusual thing about it was that you picked a guy to do the job who read my strip. I've had people from other magazines come up to interview me and say: 'Now about that strip you do--Lum & Abner.' I gradually came to expect that O'Neil would do a fair--maybe even a complimentary--story on me. What I never expected was the really sparkling story that finally came out."

Capp first expected that the cover story would run in July 1950. "But," he says, "July came & went. You had MacArthur, Stalin, General Bradley on the cover--no Capp. Then I told all my friends it would be in August. After that my two teen-age daughters went back to school in September and told all their friends. By October, I felt that everybody was snickering at me, so I just pouted. I didn't call O'Neil; there was my pride to consider.

"Meanwhile, I was getting some idea of the research you were doing. Guys I hadn't seen in 30 years would call me from places like Phoenix, Ariz, and say: 'Look, Al, can you talk? Is anyone around? A guy from TIME called me. He wants to get some old stories about you. He wants to know what you did in high school. Should I tell him?' But your research didn't confine itself to my friends. It dug out a few guys I never want to see again."

Capp is already thinking about his next issue of LIME. Says he: "What I could do next might be something like picking 'The Slob of the Year.' You know, somebody who looks like the characters who give endorsements in the patent medicine ads--the guys who look like nothing. Or maybe there could be a character called Disgusting Yokum--somebody so disgusting I can't let the public see his face. LIME, of course, would be compelled to run his face on the cover, because this was news. Everybody demanded it, so LIME has to do it for the public."

As he talks about it, a strange gleam lights Capp's eye.

Cordially yours,

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