SPAN: November 1963

The splendour of autumn slln pla.ying on leaves in Georgia.

See page twenty-:follr.

4

A SYSTEM OF SUPER HIGHWAYS

by Donald Smith

9

AMERICA'S MIXED

by Robert Lekachman

ECONOMY

14

WALTER CHRYSLm

by Alice C. Cooper and Charles A. Palmer

18

GLAMOUR ON THE HIGHWAYS

by Gwen Johnson and Barbara Hale

22

SPAN OF EVENTS

-

.flut",

24 32 PT 109 J\

by Robert J. Donovan

44

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by Bartlett H. Hayes, Jr.

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William

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A System of Super

"

safe roads for a hundred

million ca

Highways

by Donald

Smith

A System

of Super Highways

The system, although it will constitute only a little more than one per cent of the nation's total road and street mileage, will eventually carry twenty-one per cent of all traffic. Design and construction are being planned to provide roadways that will adequately handle the anticipated traffic volume of Ig75 when more than IOO million motor vehicles are expected to crowd the highways as compared with 74 million in Ig6o.

MODERN ROAD designs must provide for safety and acceleration of the growing volume of traffic.

Left, workmen construct a new section of a 4 I,OOO-mile national highway in the United States.

Top, the James Lich Freeway in San Francisco, California, is a typical example of the interchanges, overpasses and underpasses which are features of highways leading into metropolitan areas.

A close-up of one such highway, in Jersey City, New jersey, bottom, shows the heavy truck traffic, on which U.S. cities are increasingly dependent for quick delivery of the necessities of life.

The need for such a system was first described by the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads in a report to Congress in 1939 and was further justified in subsequent studies.

Acting on these recommendations, Congress in 1944 directed the creation of a system "so located as to connect by routes, as direct as practicable, the principal metropolitan areas, cities, and industrial centers, to serve the national defense, and to connect at suitable border points with

routes of continental importance in the Dominion of Canada and the Republic of Mexico."

The general locations of the routes comprising the system were selected after careful study by state highway departments, with the approval of the Bureau of Public Roads. Federal funds first provided for construction, however, were small in proportion to the work to be done.

President Eisenhower, in a message in 1954, proposed

A System

of Super Highways

A DRIVER EDUCATION

class in progress at Montgomery Blair Secondary School in Silver Spring, Maryland. Seated in front of a special training device called the Auto Trainer, the students operate a control panel which includes steering wheel, brake, clutch pedals, and gear shift. Facing them is a simulated highway on which the model car reflects the steering accuracy of the student.

A,

a far-reaching programme of highway improvement, including completion of the interstate system. Congress, by the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, launched the programme and authorized expenditures of $25 billion over a sixteenyear period for construction. Federal funds are being matched by the states on a ninety per cent Federal, ten per cent State basis.

To finance this greatly expanded highway programme, Congress increased the Federal gasoline and other automotive taxes. For the average motorist, the added cost will be about $9 a year. Studies of existing freeways show that their cost is balanced out by savings in vehicle operating expenses in less than ten years.

The safety factor alone is sufficient reason for building the interstate system, according to some authorities.

Accident rates on freeways are one-third of those on other narrower, less well built roads with comparable traffic.

A wide range of economic benefits will also result as byproducts of the interstate system. There will, of course, be more jobs in road building and in supporting industries such as steel, cement, bituminous materials, and construction equipment. All of this will have its effect in terms of payrolls and purchasing power.

Of even longer range in economic benefit will be new developments along the interstate routes. Existing freeways tell an inspiring story of economic growth, both industrial and residential. Since an essential feature of the system is the control of access, factories and homes which spring up will feed their traffic into the main stream only at interchanges, without creating slow-downs, congestion, or interference. About seventy-five per cent of the interstate system is being built entirely on new locations, thus creating countless opportunities for business.

The advantages that the system will have for longrange travel-truck, bus and passenger car-are obvious.

Vacation and business travel will take much less time and with greater comfort and less strain. Deliveries will be faster and long distance trucking operations will be more productive. The routes will be important parts of the production, assembly, and distribution lines of business and industry. National defence will greatly benefit in time of emergency.

The system will have great advantages for cities, too.

Interstate and other Federal aid arteries will go into and through la~ge U.S. cities, helping eliminate traffic jams and speeding commuters and shoppers from the suburbs.

Circumferential routes will take through traffic around the large cities, separating it from traffic headed downtown.

The system will bypass smaller cities and towns, providing access to them but taking through-traffic off congested main streets, freeing them for loc.al traffic of a more profitable nature.

The interstate highways will have far-reaching effects on all road and street systems. A large proportion of these will feed traffic into these great through highways. Capably handling the concentrated streams of traffic, the system will do much to relieve congestion on parallel roads and stret;ts.

A recent extensive study showed that the total cost of the interstate system will be about $40 billion. The pro-' gramme is revolutionary and the problems are manifold and tremendous. Future traffic needs must be estimated and detailed locations must be selected to best serve them; the ideas of state, city, and county planning agencies must be evaluated and reconciled; surveys must be made and plans drawn; complicated interchanges and bridges must be designed; rights-of-way acquired-all of these before construction can start.

The interstate system, now one fourth completed, will eventually provide new freedom and speed and safety for the movement of people and goods. It will stimulate business growth and promises to enrich the lives of millions of men, women and children in the United States .•

LEON LEON WOOD BEAN of Freeport, Maine, is typical of small independent businessmen in the United States. Mr. Bean runs a mail order business in clothing and equipment for hunters, fishermen and campers. Still active at ninety, he is seen in his retail store waiting on an old customer.

'3-'3~1

America's

N

Mixed Economy

a SIMPLE description of the American economy can possibly do justice to its multiple forms.

How does one sum up an economic system which includes country-wide chains of immense supermarkets as well as more than 400,000 individually owned grocery and meat stores? Can the simple term "capitalism" adequately describe the peaceful co-existence of the Pacific Gas & Electric Company of San Francisco, the nation's largest private producer of electrical energy and natural gas service, with assets of $2,644 million, and the Tennessee Valley

Authority, a Federal Government producer of electrical energy, with assets exceeding $2,000 million?

Or take the automobile industry whose six biggest corporations are universally regarded as the symbol of American giant corporations. One of them, General Motors Corporation, is not only the largest automobile company in the world but also the nation's largest manufacturing organization. Yet at the same time, the automobiles produced by these giant concerns are sold to the public by dealers.

3 I ,000 small independent concerns-franchised

Ame rica's

Mixed

Economy

R. H. MACY'S, top, is one of New York's largest department stores. In contrast to it is the small drugstore, below, owned and operated by William Curry of Lexington, Kentucky.

Another 250,000 small businessmen own and operate automobile service stations, selling gasoline, oil, and tyres, and performing repairs.

This diversity runs throughout the American economic structure. Thus the 500 largest corporations employ more than 9,000,000 men and women and account for more than fifty per cent of all sales of manufactured goods and mining products. Yet at the end of 1962 there were 4,8ro,000 independent business firms operating. This total, incidentally, represented a net growth of about 40,000 business firms-in the main, small businesses-since the end of 196 I. What accounts for this mixture of economic giants and small-scale enterprises? Why are some industries composed almost entirely of large organizations, employing many thousands of workers, while other industries are divided into small units? The answers to these questions have more to do with the necessities of technology than with issues of ideology or politics. Whether the ownership is public or private, such industries as steel, electric power, and automobiles will inevitably be large enterprises. It has been estimated that it takes more than $500 million to start a modern steel company. And even apart from financing such expensive enterprises, the number of firms that can operate efficiently in such industries must be small.

But there is another side to this coin. Where technology is less dominant and where c;omparatively little capital is needed, the small business predominates.

An excellent example is the women's clothing industry.

A visitor to New York City finds the nation's largest garment

the forms

of competition

are diverse

THE WIDOWS Creek hydroelectric generating plant Tennessee Valley Authority. The TVA, 0 Federal Government producer of electrical energy, was created

by Act of Congress to operate dams and plants on the Tennessee River.

of the

centre concentrated in ninety-six acres between West 34th Street and West 40th Street. Here hundreds of small firms, employing a total of 100,000 workers, compete feverishly for the trade of American women. The most successful firms are those that gauge most accurately the fashion preferences of their customers and produce garments well within the clothing budgets of American women.

The printing industry is another example of highly competitive small-scale enterprises. It is true that the printing of books and magazines for mass circulation requires very expensive presses and large organizations. But other types of printing are largely in the hands of small businessmen. In New York City alone there are nearly 4,000 commercial printers, and in the United States as a whole, more than 35,000 printers divide the market for the printed word and the business form.

The small printer has the advantage of flexibility, which permits him to meet the individual specifications of advertising agencies, law firms, banks and brokers. Although printing equipment is not cheap, even for modest-scale operations, a man with experience has little trouble in buying printing presses and linotype machines on liberal credit.

His future then depends on his own astuteness.

There are many other industries in which large, medium, and small units manage to exist side by side. Nor is it invariably the case that the largest units are the most profitable. For example, the American meat packing industry has its "big four" companies, but only two of them have been consistently profitable. On the other hand, there are

a number of medium-sized meat packing firms that have usually earned higher profits. And a great many smaller butchers have done well by catering to the special needs of local markets.

In several industries the facts of economic life are such that the public welfare is best served by the government granting a monopoly to a private corporation, as, for example, in the case of telephone, telegraph, and gas and electric utility corporations. The exclusive franchises given to these corporations are, of course, subject to careful regulation by government regulatory commissions.

In America the telephone is one of the great conveniences of life. It would lose this position if there were in the same area numerous competing telephone companie~ and if subscribers were forced to install several different telephones in order to be certain that they could reach friends or businesses and be reached in turn by them.

Similar criteria apply to electrical and other utilities.

The streets of any major city are already frequently torn up to maintain the transmission lines of a single local electricity company. Several competing electric power companies would engender a fantastic duplication of equipment and a virtually impossible street traffic situation. Thus an exclusive franchise to distribute electricity is given by a municipality to only one company, either a private company or one municipally owned.

Students of the economy long ago concluded that such industries as these are areas of "natural monopoly." The great expense of duplication and the enormous costs of

America's

Mixed

Economy

operations in the utilities field combine to support this judgment. No sensible person would suggest that additional competitors in the areas of "natural monopoly" would improve the service to the public.

T

HE FORMS of business rivalry in the United States are diverse because competition is one of those deceptively simple words with numerous meanings.

The oldest and most respected form of competition is in the field of price. Where price forms the basis for rivalry, businessmen seek additional sales primarily by offering merchandise at prices lower than those charged by their competitors. As a result, all businessmen feel continual pressure to operate efficiently and to match or better the prices of rivals. The inefficient businessman falls behind the procession and ultimately closes shop. The exceptionally efficient businessman earns considerably higher profits.

The beneficiary of price competition inevitably is the customer. He is assiduously wooed by rival sellers of the same products.

There are few areas of the American economy where price competition is entirely absent. In retailing particularly it is a dominant force.

Food stores run daily specials and thrifty housewives scan the newspaper advertisements comparing the bargains.

Gimbel's and Macy's-two of New York's famous department stores-not only jealously meet each other's prices but also meet the attack of still more relentless price cutters, such as so-called "discount" stores which sell standard consumer goods for cash at prices substantially lower than conventional stores which offer credit, delivery and other extra services.

In spite of Government-aid programmes to support prices of certain farm products at a minimum level, farming remains an area in which competition by price is important. Farmers who grow vegetables and fruit, milk dairy herds, and raise poultry sell their products in basically competitive markets.

Competition in manufacturing takes somewhat more complicated forms. In many manufacturing industries investment is so huge, firms so large, and rivals are so few, that unmitigated price-cutting often appears to threaten industry disorganization and financial ruin for many enterprises. Moreover, if only one firm survives the conflict, neither most Americans nor the result-monopoly-pleases their government.

In the steel industry, for example, U.S. Steel Corporation owns 28.4 per cent of steel ingot capacity, Bethlehem Steel Corporation 15.6 per cent, and Republic Steel Corporation 8.6 per cent. The twelve largest companies are in command offive-sixths of their industry's capacity. Although these twelve companies and their smaller brethren do compete for larger shares of the market for steel, they have over the years diminished the role of competition by price.

The arrangement which has evolved is fairly typical in heavy manufacturing. Typically, the industry leader -here U.S. Steel-announces its prices and in most cases other firms voluntarily adopt these prices for their own use.

But this may not always be the case. In April 1962 U.S. Steel announced a small price increase and some of its competitors followed suit. Some, however, did not. In this situation-made more acute by the Kennedy Administration's intense disapproval of the price rise-U.S. Steel and the other companies rescinded their increase, so as not to lose to their competitors a significant percentage of their sales. Such a loss would in all probability have been enough to cancel any profits accruing from the price rise. , A similar condition prevails in automobile manufacturing where General Motors, which produces about half

the new automobiles sold in the United States, usually announces its new models' prices ahead of the other five automobile makers, who, in turn, adjust their new models' prices accordingly.

The automobile industry furnishes a good example of some ways other than price in which businessmen aggressively jostle for superior position. One of these is innovation-the introduction of new features which appeal to prospective customers.

Some of the competition which affects businessmen is indirect. This is the competition between industries.

Intelligent businessmen are aware that even when the number of rivals in their own industry is small, they dare not relax.

In a large national market such as the United States, there is a generalized competition for the consumer's dollar.

The alert businessman is aware that if his profit margins are too high, it will not be long before new competition thrusts its way into his market and captures some of his potential sales by offering lower prices.

Thus competition operates in a great many ways, expected and unexpected, to benefit consumers and to encourage business efficiency.

AMERICANS HAVE not been willing to trust their destinies entirely to the uncontrolled operations of free private markets because few of them have believed that consumers will invariably be protected, that businessmen will behave always as they should, or that where monopoly exists it can be trusted to always advance the general welfare.

At least since the latter part of the nineteenth century, the American consensus has been that government has a part to play in the economic affairs of the nation. In general, government intervenes least when competition is fiercest.

But when the government has deemed it necessary to intervene, its favoured instruments have been the regulatory commission and the antitrust statutes.

In point of time the regulatory commission started a trifle earlier than the antitrust laws. In the nineteenth century the railroads which connected the interior of the country with the more densely populated East were a matter of li(e and death to farmers who took up land and raised crops in the West for sale in the eastern seaboard cities. The rates which these railroads charged frequently made the difference between economic prosperity or economic calamity to the independent western farmer. The protest of these farmers against what they considered unfair rate-settings by the railroads helped to persuade Congress in 1887 to set up the first national regulatory agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC).

Since that time the ICC has regulated the rates which railroads may charge and the quality of service which they must offer shippers and passengers. Under ICC rules, furthermore, a railroad may not abandon an unprofitable line or curtail passenger service without ICC permission.

In other fields of natural monopoly, the ICC soon had its imitators. The Federal Power Commission (FPC) oversees the operations of electrical power and natural gas companies which operate in more than one state. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has jurisdiction over radio and television broadcasting.

Since the early days of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration in the 1930's, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has set the standards for the protection of the interests of the public and investors against malpractices in the issuance and sale of securities.

Inevitably commission regulation has varied in effectiveness from period to period and case to case.

The ICC, the FCC, and the FPC have operated to protect

the regulation consumers from overcharges, industry inefficiency, and inadequate service. The commissions have recognized that while monopoly often springs from the technology of these industries, the government can act to insure equitable treatment for the customers of the monopolies.

The objectives of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have been somewhat more general. In the first place, the FTC tries to protect consumers from deceptive advertising and can prevent a company from making unsubstantiated claims for a product. In the second place, it operates to preserve competition among businessmen. Always alert to monopolistic tendencies, the FTC impedes any disposition on the part of businessmen to favour some customers over others. It initiates investigations of suspected wrongdoing.

It is also responsible for the administration of the RobinsonPatman Act wh~ch forbids discriminatory pricing in favour of certain dealers over others, and also forbids the setting of prices unreasonably low to drive out competition.

The antitrust laws represent a governmental effort to create an appropriate environment for free competitive business. These laws are designed to counter the tendency, which began to be marked in the nineteenth century, of large companies producing oil, steel, sugar, tobacco, meat and other items to combine into trusts, or cartels, which control the commercial policy of a number of businesses operated independently.

Standard Oil was probably the most famous of these trusts. As the nineteenth century moved towards its close, many Americans in and out of public life began to fear that the trusts might eliminate small businesses and curtail effective competition. Their concern led to the passage in 1890 of the Sherman Antitrust Act, a significant innovation.

In one celebrated phrase, this law prohibited "combinations in restraint of trade."

The Sherman Antitrust Act was the beginning rather than the ending of an era. For in 1914, Congress strengthened the legal weapons against monopoly by enacting the Clayton Act which forbade corporations to acquire stock in competing concerns and outlawed contracts whereby a manufacturer limited the right of a purchaser to deal with competing manufacturers. It also prohibited price discrimination and interlocking directorates under conditions that lessen competition.

The Clayton Act further states that because human labour is not a commodity, labour organizations are not to be considered conspiracies in restraint of trade and therefore are exempt from the operation of antitrust laws.

To sum up, competition, despite the growing size of American business, remains a basic tenet of economic faith in the United States. The informal national consensus is that what large business, national unions, and other private groups do so affects the entire community that no administration, either Republican or Democratic, can hold itselLaloof.

T

HE AMERICAN approach to the regulation of business is essentially pragmatic.

In those industries where business units are small, entry is easy, and competition is stern, the government tends to confine regulation to safety of working conditions, minimum wages and maximum hours, and quality of product.

In manufacturing industries like steel, chemicals, autos, and aluminium which are dominated by small numbers of large organizations, the Department of Justice watches closely to see that they do not act in collusion, compete unfairly, or combine to infringe on competition.

The American response to the natural monopoly has been the regulatory commission which has functioned as a watchdog over prices, quality, service, and profits.

of business

is essentially

pragmatic

In extreme instances, the Federal Government has created its own facilities to fill those economic needs which private enterprise does not meet.

The Tennessee Valley Authority, through its activities in the field of public electric power, agricultural reclamation, and piver navigation, rescued an entire region that had been devastated by floods and soil erosion. In the American West, the Grand Coulee Dam and Hoover Dam are equally striking testimonials to the capacity of the U.S. Government to provide services beyond the capacity of private enterprise to supply.

Many American cities own their buses and subways.

Many smaller cities and towns have municipally owned electric light companies. Housing for low-income families is frequently built by public funds.

CARS ON an overhead assembly line in a new automobile assembly plant in Flint, Michigan.

No doubt, Americans prefer private to public production. Nevertheless, that fifth of the Gross National Product (the dollar value of goods and services produced in. a year) which passes through the hands of government -local, State, and Federal-finances such items of public production as postal delivery, education, housing, waterways, and highways.

Thus, in several respects the United States has a mixed economy. The mixture is rich enough to include large and small units; industries whose members compete by cutting prices and industries which emphasize quality, service, and innovation; natural monopolies like public utilities and natural competitive industries like the women's clothing industry; areas where the government's intervention is minimal and other areas such as electrical power production and distribution where regulatory control is always a government function and where direct government ownership sometimes exists.•

P. CHRYSLER, whose WALTER calloused hands and bulkingshoulders helped to turn a way of life upside down, is all the American successstory heroes rolled into one-Horatio Alger with a high-compression engine.

Mechanic to magnate, dime an hour to a million dollars a year with never a "dirty deal" on the way-the story starts with a boy pushing a broom in a railroad roundhouse, and ends with a man wielding a sceptre over the vast industrial empire which his own hands, brain, and vision had brought into being.

Like all good stories, this one has a twist. Walter Chrysler made his two biggest advances by seeming to retreat.

Twice in his life he fought to get new jobs, each of which paid only half the salary he had been earning. But the first job made him a machinist.

The second put him in the automobile industry.

If, as is sometimes claimed, modern big business is a form of Red Indian warfare, Chrysler grew up in appropriate country. Ellis, Kansas, where he was born in r875, was a frontier town. Custer's famous Last Stand took place j.ust when Chrysler was a year old. Two years later, Chief Dull Knife terrorized the Kansas countryside by his massacre of white settlers only two counties away from Ellis.

Young Walt Chrysler's own earliest memories were of the Red Indian scares of r 880 when, as a six-year-old, he huddled in the stone schoolhouse with the women and children, watching the stern-faced men of the community standing on guard with their rifles at the windows.

Nowadays, small boys dream of becoming airplane pilots. In Chrysler's boyhood they yearned to become locomotive engineers. Walt was the envy of every boy in town, for Henry Chrysler, his father, was the crack engineer of his division of the spreading Union Pacific railroad. When the railroad bought its first coal-burning locomotive, it was he who stepped from the cab of his wood-burner to operate the new monster. A six-shooter slung at his hip was as much a part of his equipment as the traditional big red bandanna knotted around his neck. Walt was only seven when his father first hoisted him into the cab to take him along on the day's run.

Cinders pelted young Walt's face with tiny black flakes as he leaned from the fireman's window and called signals. Beside the tracks, small mounds of earth with crude wooden crosses marked ambushes where some of Henry Chrysler's friends had fallen in Red Indian fights, and above the clangour of the swaying locomotive the stories of those battles rang in young Walt's ears.

Walter Ch rysler: Walt's early life was a fantastic mixture of the Wild West and the encroaching civilization. At school the highest honour a boy could achieve was to be classified as "the toughest guy in town." Several fist-fights usually took place in the space of a fifteenminute recess. In them young '!\Talt learned to hold his own; then he trotted off two afternoons a week to take piano lessons.

At twelve Walt was marble champion of the town, but business affairs soon began to crowd the sport career out of his life. From a mail-order catalogue he ordered a supply of fancily engraved calling cards which he peddled from house to house.

Since no one in Ellis used calling cards, this business dropped off; then he turned to selling silverware which was displayed in a black imitation leather case with a red plush interior "so handsome that a sale was just a matter of throwing back the lid." Walt's mother, impressed by her son's talent for salesmanship, drafted him to work up and handle a milk route. He fed, cared for, and milked the cows, and delivered the milk to his customers twice a day. All his other commercial ventures dwindled away under the strain of that one.

Walt was fourteen when his father built their first permanent home. For a long time that house was the pride of Ellis. Two storeys, a shingled roof, a large porch, and a picket fence all around the yard made "Walt's place" the envy of the neighbourhood.

None of the courses given in the local high school had much appeal for Walt. He was interested in mechanics.

The next best thing was a monthly magazine of his father's, The Scientific American. Every month Walt studied it from cover to cover, and whenever anything puzzled him or left him unsatisfied, he wrote long letters to the editors asking further information.

His father wanted him to go on to college after he finished his high school course, but Walt rebelled. An older brother had gone into the locomotive repair shop, and that was what Walt wanted to do.

"You won't learn machinery, and that's all I've got to say," said Henry

Chrysler firmly. "You can't become an apprentice until I say the word, and I won't recommend you."

What the father overlooked was that his son had just as stubborn a nature as his own. Young Walt went on down to the railroad roundhouse and got himself hired to sweep floors.

The pay was only ten cents an hour, but he put into the job all the effort of a man who is wrapped up in his work. At the end of six months, the master mechanic agreed to speak to Walt's father about an apprenticeship.

"If anybody ever deserved the chance," said the master mechanic, "you do. You've stuck to a dirty job without complaining."

Henry Chrysler finally relented, and seventeen-year-old Walter Chrysler started his four-year term as an apprentice machinist. For the first year he was to get five cents an hour.

This was only half the pay he had earned with his broom, but, as he said later, "Opportunity, not money, was what I was after."

The first two years of his apprenticeship passed uneventfully. He was a husky, keen-eyed young man, as rugged as the heavy machinery upon which he worked. But there was a hot, quick temper in his make-up, too, and towards the end of his second year it nearly upset all his progress.

One day in the shop, when Walt was stuffing a freight-car wheel bearing, a practical joker caught him on the ear with a dripping greasy rag.

Walt flushed with anger; he scooped two fistfuls of the stringy, greasy wool from the stuffing-box, and leaped after the fellow who had hit him. WaIfs attacker took refuge behind the shop foreman's door. No sooner had the door closed than it opened again, and Walt, just coming into range, let fly his handful of muck.

The man whose face came to view when the mess was wiped away was the wrong one. The coughing and' spluttering victim was the shop foreman himself. Indistinct as were his words, Walt clearly understood what they meant. He was fired on the spot.

Two weeks later Walt had made sufficient promises to curb his anger in the future, and was taken back.

American

Workman

"opportunity

was what I was after"

After that experience, he placed his training above his combative instincts and settled his arguments outside the shop.

For entertainment, Walt liked to play the tuba. It was more an explosive than an aesthetic expression of his nature, and what he lacked in artistry he made up in volume. When his apprenticeship ended, Walt was twenty-one and had just two things he wanted to do. The first was to learn more about machinery; the second, to see the country. His mechanical ability assured fulfilment of his first desire, and the tuba became his passport for the second.

I

N THAT day it was the custom for the wealthy young man, on his graduation from college, to embark on the Grand Tour to complete his education. In a less exalted fashion, the young machinist who finished his apprenticeship "hit the road." By the time he settled down to one job, after his years of roving, he had worked on every conceivable kind of machine, under every sort of boss, on all kinds of products. His "Grand Tour" gave him a thorough understanding of his craft. He really knew his trade.

For five years Walt "boomed" around the West, rarely working longer than six weeks in anyone shop, and never ending with any money ahead. Tiring of a job, he would entrust his tuba to a friendly railroad conductor, asking him to leave it at the roundhouse of whatever town was next on the list, and then try to catch up with his travelling instrument. The rules of the game forbade his paying fare; so he rode freights, went "blind baggage," or pinch-hit for brakemen.

On arrival in a new town, the first step was always to recover his tuba and get into the social whirl by joining the local band. He would then land a job, work for a while, and move on again.

Life went on in this merry, vagabond manner until once he left his tuba in Ogden, Utah, and didn't remember it until he got to Salt Lake City. Something frivolous and

irresponsible passed out of his life with the loss of his battered horn. He was twenty-six at the time, and knocking around was beginning to lose its appeal. He settled down to a job in Salt Lake City and worked steadily for a year.

At the end of that year, Walter Chrysler's ambitions had crystallized.

A constant interchange of letters with Della Forker, his high school sweetheart who still lived with her parents in Ellis, helped the settling process.

In the spring of I go I, for the first time he paid fare on a railroad for a ticket from Denver to Ellis. He and Della Forker were married, and the couple returned to Salt Lake City.

They started married life with sixty dollars in cash and an unlimited reserve of hope. Walt was earning thirty cents an hour and working ten hours a day in the railroad shops in Salt Lake City. He subscribed to a correspondence course in electrical engineering, added several daily hours of home study to his ten hours of work, and started his climb towards the top.

The next ten years brought rapid changes in Walter Chrysler's life.

When a broken-down locomotive threatened to upset the schedule of the annual Mormon festival, Chrysler's swift repairs earned him a promotion to roundhouse foreman. From Salt Lake City he was transferred to Trinidad, Colorado, where he became master mechanic for two entire railroad divisions. From Trinidad he moved to Childress, Texas, to supervise the building of some new railroad shops; and from there the Chicago Great Western Railway lured him away with an offer of $200 per month.

Between I g06 and I g08 he rose as far as a man could go in a mechanical job on a railroad. He knew how to get along with men, and he was able to do with his own hands any job which he ever asked any subordinate to do. Hard-boiled and husky, he had the brains to make decisions.

In Ig08 Walter Chrysler went to Chicago to see the Automobile Show.

Today we have "airplane nuts."

Chrysler became an "automobile

nut," and was never the same again.

On what he planned as an afternoon visit, he stayed fascinated for four days. Nothing else in all his life had stirred him nearly so much. He had been working on mass transportation as long as he could remember, but here was individual transportation, tailored to a family's needs. In the show was an immense ivory-white Locomobile touring car with red leather upholstery, the luxury-liner of its time, which held him spellbound.

A lavish display of brass trim and khaki top supported by varnished wood bows gave the big machine a sporty look that Chrysler cQuldn't. resist. He had to have that car.

The great obstacle, however, was the price. The salesman to whom Chrysler broached the subject said calmly, "The price is $5,000." Mter days of wrangling, it was finally understood that the price was not only $5,000, but $5,000 cash, for instalment selling of automobiles was then unknown. Chrysler had just $700 in the bank. Arrangements were finally made whereby a friend co-signed his note, and he raised the necessary balance through a bank. The gleaming Locomobile was his, at so much a month for many, many months.

Since no paved roads then extended outside the city limits, the treasure was shipped from Chicago to Oelwein, Iowa, in a freight car.

A teamster towed it to a barn behind the Chrysler house; and there it sat for three months.

"It seems to me," said Mrs. Chrysler (who, wonderful woman, had consented without an adverse word to his spending the last of their savings and mortgaging their future on a "toy"), "the least we could do would be to take a ride in it!"

"I want to learn about it first," replied Walter.

Eight times during those three months, he tore the car completely to pieces and put it back together again. Only when he was satisfied that he knew the function of every part in that machine was he ready for the first ride.

The neighbours had become 'accus- . tomed to the roar of the motor in the Chrysler barn, but one morning the sound indicated that the car was moving out towards the road. A crowd quickly assembled. There sat Chrysler, wearing goggles and a greasy duster, letting the car ease backward out of its stable. The crowd parted to make room, and Chrysler engaged the clutch. At that, the huge machine lunged forward into a grassy ditch. Shaken but unhurt, the proud owner inspected the superficial damages; then called on a teamster to pull him out for another try.

Walter

Chrysler

This time he manoeuvred the machine into the middle of the road before letting it get away under its own power. Then the back wheels kicked up a cloud of dust, and Chrysler was off. The dirt road made a complete square, a mile in each direction, around Chrysler's home. On the first turn he forgot to push back the hand-throttle, and the heavy car skidded dangerously on two wheels.

By the second turn he had discovered how to slow up and take the corner with more grace and safety. On the home stretch, he roared down the middle of the road, and the Chrysler family was launched on its own wheels.

Meanwhile, Chrysler's responsibilities were growing. His railroad job kept crowding in on the spare time he enjoyed spending with his car.

Work, of course, came first. There were now two little girls and a baby boy in the family. Chrysler was thirty-five years old and anxious to get ahead.

When the chance came to become master mechanic for the American Locomotive Company in Pittsburgh, he seized it and moved the family once more. Mrs. Chrysler rather hoped that they would stay in Pittsburgh long enough to settle down, but no! There was one more move to make.

ONEDAYin 19II,CharlesW.Nash visited Pittsburgh. A former carriage builder, he was now president of the Buick Motor Company. Telephoning to Chrysler, he suggested an appointment for lunch. Chrysler, of course, had an idea of what was in the wind, and accepted eagerly.

On the way to the appointment, he passed a stalled automobile. Rather, he encountered a stalled automobile -he never passed one. By the time he got the car going again, his hands were greasy and he was late for his appointment.

Nash was annoyed. To make matters worse, when the two men shook hands Nash found Chrysler's black thumbprint firmly printed on the back of his.

That was a bad start for Chrysler, who had hoped that much would come of this meeting. The luncheon proceeded in cold silence, barely broken until cigars were ordered.

Nash waited for Chrysler's choice.

"Panatelas," said Chrysler.

"Panatelas," said Nash, brightening. "Well, young man, perhaps we do have something in common after aIL" "Yes, sir."

"Tell me," said Nash, "have you ever given automobiles any thought?"

"Oh, yes!" Chrysler replied quickly, then checked his eagerness. "That is, off and on for the last five years."

"You've done well with the railroads, I understand," said Nash.

"Been at it all my life," Chrysler replied. "My father was an engineer, and I more or less grew up in locomotive repair shops."

"Automobiles are beginning to need mechanical minds," Nash continued. "So far, we've been able to build them much as we built wagons, but that's all changing. We need a works manager at the Flint plant who can keep us in step mechanically.

Would you like the job?"

"Yes, sir!"

"How much salary would you expect?"

"Well," Chrysler replied, forcing himself to speak slowly. "The American Locomotive Company pays me $I2,000 a year."

The light of interest left Nash's eyes.

He folded his napkin and placed it carefully beside his plate.

"Well," he said finally, "that's the end of that. The automobile industry is young and risky. We couldn't hope to pay any such figure."

Chrysler saw that Nash was trying to close the interview as quickly as possible. "How much could you pay?" he asked suddenly.

"We can't afford to pay over $6,000," said Nash, half rising, ready to leave.

"I accept it," snapped Chrysler.

Nash dropped back to his chair.

What sort of man was this, who was willing to exchange a sure thing for a gamble, and pay half his salary for the privilege? Had Chrysler been bluffing about that $I2,000 salflry?

That was not likely, for the young man had a wonderful reputation as a boss machinist. At any rate, Nash closed the deal in a hurry, and the Buick Motor Company suddenly had a works manager who was a mechanic rather than a carpenter. vValter Chrysler, at the age of thirty-six, was finally on his way.

When Chrysler moved to Flint, Michigan, in the winter of I 9 I I, the main Buick building looked more like a large carpenter shop than an automobile factory. Woodworkers dominated the thinking of the organization, and young Chrysler, a machinist, hardly knew where to begin. But he tore into his new job with the same spirit in which he had taken apart and put together his Locomobile. Under his direction there began to roll out of the shops motor cars which looked more like independent vehicles than awkward, selfpropelled wagons. Metal began to replace wood. New motors, as sturdy and reliable as the locomotives on

WALTERlCHRYSLER

\

which Chrysler had learned his trade, were developed to make motoring more of a pleasure and less of an adventure.

Machines are useless without men with brains to direct them. Chrysler became known as a production genius, but perhaps his real genius lay in his ability to select and direct the men who made that production possible, and to command their loyalty. At Buick, needing good men and needing them badly, he remembered his friends among the machinists in railroad shops all over the country. He would wire one or another, stating simply, "Got ajob for you llere. Come at once." Regardless of what the man might be doing, his memory of Chrysler was such that he usually dropped everything and answered the call.

Chrysler soon won the respect Of his superiors. Most of them had learned their mechanical engineering in colleges, but here was a man who could work with tools beside any man in the shop; then go up to the front office and explain in flawless technical terms what was needed and why.

The machinists liked him because he. was one of them; the executives liked him because he spoke their language and got results.

Buick soon found that it could, after all, pay not $I2,000 a year, but $25,000.

The newly-formed General Motors Corporation, of which Buick

"we all got our start In overalls"

was a division, declared that no one department should have a monopoly on a man like Chrysler; so they made him first vice-president in charge of operations in addition to president of Buick, and increased his pay to $500,000 a year.

By the time America entered the first World War, Walter P. Chrysler did more than simply draw his pay cheques; he worked double time, sixteen and eighteen hours a day, keeping his finger on every move made inside the mushrooming plants. During the War, established factories turned over their tools and machinery for the manufacturing of shells, guns, and Army trucks. New automobile companies were formed and were immediately swamped with more orders than they could fill. General ~10tors assumed its share of the armament load, building airplane motors and, towards the end of the War, tanks.

I

N 1919, at the age of forty-five, Chrysler retired. He had all the money he would ever need, and he had worked enough for two lifetimes.

But, like most Americans, he chafed more out of harness than in it, and a few months of idleness was all he could stand. The automobile industry was having growing pains, and the

Š

1942 by Harcourt.

proud father who had nursed it through its whooping-cough years could not stand aside and watch it suffer. Bankers whose heavy investment in the Willys-Overland Company seemed a certain loss begged Chrysler to lend his experienced hand. "One million dollars a year for two years," Chrysler set as his terms. "Fair enough," said the bankers. And Chrysler was busy again, redesigning the Overland car, reorganizing the shops and nursing the ailing company back to financial health.

At this time the Maxwell Company had its back to the wall, and was calling for help. Walter Chrysler had become a legend in the automotive world. He knew how to make things go; he had a reputation for working miracles with sick organizations.

"The truth was," Chrysler said, "I just hired the right men for the right jobs. After that everything worked like a clock."

At any rate, he took over the management of the Maxwell Company in 1920 and started combing out the tangles. The process kept growing more and more involved.

He found himself back on his old sixteen-hour schedule. A new motor here, sleeker lines there, a faster operation on the assembly line-all those things spun through his mind night and day.

Out of the jumble came plans for a completely new car; not just a better Buick or a better Willys or a better Maxwell, but an automobile which would literally be years ahead of its time. Just when his family expected Chrysler to wind up his affairs with the Maxwell Company, he came home with somewhat different news.

"I've arranged to buyout the Maxwell," he announced.

"The Chrysler Corporation will be doing business soon."

The feature of the first Chrysler automobile was a high-compression engine. Such engines had previously been the expensive experiments of racing-car owners. Manufacturers had insisted that high-compression could never be utilized in an inexpensive car. Chrysler engineers tackled the problem, and produced a car that was the sensation of the market during its first year.

Chrysler tried to get space in which to display this first model at the 1924 Automobile Show in New York. The rules of the show forbade him. Space in the Grand Central Palace, where the show was held, was allotted in proportion to the number of automobiles a manufacturer had sold the year before. A Chrysler automobile hadn't even existed the year before; Brace and Company.

Reprinted

by permission

from Twenty

so space could not be given to him.

Chrysler was determined to get into that show one way or another.

After a long, dreary session with his colleagues who had given up hope, he found a solution. "They may hold their show at the Grand Central Palace," he said, "but all the manufacturers stay at the Hotel Commodore while they're in town. We'll rent the lobby of the Commodore and hold our own show."

They did. Without actually being in it, the Chrysler Corporation stole the 1924 Automobile Show. Four years later the organization included Dodge, De Soto, and Plymouth, and ranked as one of the "big three" in the industry.

When the depression of the 1930'S threatened to slow automobile manufacturing to a standstill, Chrysler kept up the enthusiasm and courage of his corporation by plunging it into research which had been impossible while the plants were operating at full capacity. "As the result," he said, "we turned out better cars in 1936 and 1937 than we ever did before."

Chrysler's charities were, as one would expect, practical and businesslike. In 1933 he endowed Jhe first chartered industrial college in the United States, the Institute of Engineering which bears his name in Detroit. It seeks to bridge that gap between mechanical and executive training which Chrysler attained by long hard work and study. Money and social prestige never changed his character; old railroad friends, machinists with grease-stained, calloused hands, were guests at his home as often as were the socially elect.

In 1938 his physicians warned him against over-exertion. Heart trouble began to show its deadly warnings, and for the next two years he was a sick man. In August 1940, he retired in the only way a man of his temperament could retire-in death.

Walter P. Chrysler lived the life of an American workman. In his autobiography, published serially in The Saturday Evening Post in the summer of 1937, he recalled a board meeting of the huge Chrysler Cor-' poration. A fine-looking group of executives sat around the long table; Chrysler studied each one of them and noted one very important fact.

"They all got their start in overails," he wrote. "We were, all of us who sat at that table, American workmen in the simple, exact meaning of the term. Those who come after us in the years ahead will be the same, and the reason for this is that there is no way for men to qualify themselves for what we do at that table except by working and learning.".

Modern Americans.

STUDEBAKER LARK sports-type family car is hardtop with sliding sunroof.

fs -,7 g., 3> ~-1-9,q4 HENRY FORD drives his first car, the Quadricycle. The little vehicle had bicycle tyres and four-horsepower, two-cylinder engine with a speed of ten miles on hour.

Glamour

on

the

Highway As

THE new automobiles stream off assembly lines each veal', Ame; icars enjoy o"e of their hvolll ite pasti'nes; looking them all over and passing their verdict on the new trends. Deci::;ls get trimmer every vear, ard the most iI,teresting stvle i'1l1ovation is the use of creases i;1stead of chro;ne stt~ips'0'1 the sicks to ,f!;ivea razor-edge silhouette.

Emph?sis is not Oll style alone. E1.sier, thriftier maintenance is stress:d by m"l111factllre"s who provide permanentlv lnbri 'ated t:a;:smissions al cl rear axles that will never re~jui"e d:'ainin,::.i01' refilling, Vulnerable parts of the exhaust system are being coated to prevent eorrosi"J,1.

L,)llger intervals between IlJbri~ation, and self-adjusting brakes are other i:nprovements. Warranti¡~s have been extended 0'1 most cms, the 101gest on the Chrysler-anv part repheed or repaired withijl five years or 50,000 miL¡s of dl iving.

Once more, car buyers have ample choice-some 300 models, ranging in price from S I ,846 for a Rambler American at the factory to $ I 1,500 for a fully equipped Cadillaeall carefully designed to offer solid perfom1allce as well as glamour.

1963 CHEVROLET Impala sports coupe, with its straight-line styling and sharp side creases, has a flowing look of motian.

S>

1\1-

3"

11174

CADILLAC CONVERTIBLE is over /8 feet long. Traditional is tailored to give a lower profile.

trademark,

the tail fin,

T f!.. A-t-f.s - '4 ( - B ~N - '3 ').

G lamou r on the

Highway

TR.ITNS -It,l.~

SN-3"7/"83

PLYMOUTH

FURY, looking longer and wider, has vertical turn signals placed in an oval at outer edges of fenders.

t

Courtesy

of Ford Motor Company

1I~1-

MODEL-K FORDS leave, in 1904, the Piquette Avenue plant in Detroit. The engines, frames and bodies were built separately, then brought together and assembled.

TR.PrNS

- 14/13

CHEVROLET CORVETTE has sleek fibreglass body for sports car lovers.

~N

••3"1-

Courtesy of Chevrolet

-

1\

S4

Motor Division

THIS OUT-OF-THE-ORDINARY picture shows a Royal Navy Sea Vixen, right, passing fuel to an American Navy Sky hawk, which in turn is pumping fuel to a U.S. Skywarrior, about to connect with a U.K. Scimitar. Event occurred du ri ng recent NATO exercises in Med iterranean.

A CUT AWAY MOD EL of the new Lifeguard Safety Spare tyre which can be driven 100 miles after a blow-out is shown by an official of the Goodyear Tyre and Rubber Co. The inner tyre with a honeycombed tread remains inflated after the outer tyre is disabled by a blow-out.

AM E R I C A' 5 S Y N COM communications satellite successfully relayed television pictures for the first time at the end of September. This was the longest TV relay in history involving some 50,000 miles. Syncom is the world's first synchronous satellite and has been repeatedly used for two-way telephone, teletype, still-picture and radio broadcasts. The satellite is seen here undergoing a final instrumentation checkout prior to launching.

THE "HIP PACK," a new load-carrying device developed by a U.S. firm, concentrates the load on the hips rather than shoulders and leaves the arms completely free. The device should benefit, among others, rescue crews who have to carry heavy equipment and supplies into difficult terrain. Here a 27-kilogram outboard motor is carried with ease.

THIS GALLEY OF newspaper type was produced by the computer behind it and an automatic Iinecasting machine.

The computer punches copy on paper tape, centre, which is fed to the Iinecasting machine. Many publishers of newspapers, books and brochures in the United States are already using or plan to install such computing systems.

UNIQUE OPERATIONS performed recently at University Hospital in Baltimore have assured a normal lease of life to these six-year-old twins. They had earlier been given less than five years to live because of holes in their hearts. The operations which sealed off the holes were performed by 14-man teams of surgeons and nurses.

span of events

GERARD PIEL, publisher of the magazine Scientific American, was recently awarded the Kalinga Prize, given by an Indian industrialist, for the popularization of science. Mr. Piel, left, is seen here with Editor Dennis Flanagan, centre, and General Manager Donald H. Miller.

THIS UNUSUAL Radio-Radar antenna at Concord, Massachusetts, made of 220 identical plates, is an accurate but relatively inexpensive device to "hear" signals from space.

"The

Lands Are All Most

THE INTERNATIONALLY famous cherry trees which rim the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C., attract thousands of tourists in April when the trees bloom.

IN

TH:E centuries since Columbus, America has been discovered time and time again by travellers from many lands and of many tastes. At first, adventurers came to seek treasure; Ponce de Leon sought the fountain of youth.

Millions followed him, seeking a more substantial kind of regeneration of themselves after suffering dogmatism, oppression, and poverty of opportunity in Europe. The frontier was pushed westward, and pioneers tilled the lands. The wilderness became a nation of farms, and then a nation of cities. This experience and the people's passionate quest for freedom have shaped a unique spirit of boldness, curiosity, and individual expression which has become as much a part of the American scene as the Grand Canyon, the vast open plains, or the New York skyline.

THE HILLS Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun,-the vales Stretching in pensive quietness between; The venerable woods-rivers that move In majesty, and the complaining brooks That make the meadows green.

-William

Cullen Bryant

Beautiful

... . .. said Christopher Columbus in I 493, and he added: "The people are natural and generous with what they have, to such a degree as no one would believe but he who had seen it." Americans hope that today's visitor will discover for himself the beauties if their country-and their own warm welcome.

SC.E-'-47-- I YOSEMITE

IV}

VALLEY, California.

Lands Are All Most Beautiful. .. " S.N-?>'1

"g,.

NEW YORK at night, Brooklyn Bridge.

~C-E-b38-Nl

"The Lands Are All Most Beautiful. .. " ~N

~ 31 I,gg.

Continued

A CLUSTER of sailboats on San Francisco Bay is dwarfed by city skyline and Bay Bridge.

The bridge, including its approaches, is more than eight miles long, and is used by 30,000 commuters daily.

HEAT LAMPS are used to dry newly painted automobiles in the Caditlac plant, Detroit, Michigan.

Photograph

In twentieth-century America the pioneer legacy is expressed in a love for travel-for seeing new places, meeting new people, and doing different things-that has made Americans the most mobile people on the face of the globe.

Just a few years ago travel for them was a pastime; today it is a habit, and one that is catching on around the world.

The day is probably not too distant when travel will be a requirement and a basic element of a formal education.

In the meantime, Americans in record numbers are packing up and hitting the road on business trips, vacations, and short visits. An overwhelming number set out just for the sheer fun of travel and the excitement of seeing their homeland. According to a survey by the American Automobile Association, some fifty-five per cent of the U.S. population takes at least one vacation trip within the country during the year. Of all such journeys over one hundred miles, eighty-seven per cent are by car, four per cent by plane, three per cent by train, two per cent by bus, and the remaining four per cent by a combination of these means of transport. The private automobile now accounts for ninety per cent of all American domestic vacation or. pleasure travel-and during 1961, an estimated 92,000,000 people took vacation or pleasure trips by car, driving almost 70,000,000,000 miles. Virtually every town and village is accessible by good, all-weather roads, and with the completion of the now-abuilding interstate system of highways in the 1970's, every city of 50,000 and more will be linked by super highways. The motorist will thus be able to drive across the United States on non-stop highways with no traffic lights.

The new highways have spurred bus travel, too, cutting the driving time between major cities drastically. Now buses can match, or even better, the running time of some of the fastest trains. Even though there has been an over-all decline in the volume of bus travel over the past decade, surveys show that there are actually more long-distance bus

by Joe Clark

"The Lands Are All Most Beautiful. .. "

IND

trips today than there were in 1950-and the service is much better. Many of today's super buses are not only air-conditioned but also offer such features as tinted-glass picture windows, lounges, music, washrooms, and free snacks.

The U.S. railroads have kept pace, too. There are now about 15,000 passenger trains in operation daily and in the past fifteen years the industry has spent over $ 1,500,000,000 on improvements in passenger service and facilities. Some of these innovations include installation of plastic-domed cars, popular with travellers in mountains and other scenic areas; the use of fast, lightweight trains; and passenger quarters wired for radio reception, public address systems, and telephone service to and from moving trains. On many railroads, a stewardess, hostess, nurse, and train secretary are available.

In the air, six out of every ten of the world's plane travellers, outside the Soviet Union, are Americans. In 1961, the fifty-six U.S. scheduled airlines carried over 58,000,000 passengers on domestic and international flights.

International carriers over the North Atlantic routes set a new record that year, carrying over 2,000,000 passengers.

With the advent of the jet age, no matter where a traveller

-I"~ - t::.

is in the world, he is never more than a day's flying time from a big population centre of the United States.

As a result of the speed and ease of transportation today, the latest "discoverer" of America has been the foreign tourist, come to see for himself the scenic splendour of the continent, and to sample the rich variety of life of the American people.

With company coming, the Federal Government in 1961 created the United States Travel Service which gave the country's communications with the world a new dimension. On the occasion of the establishment of the Travel Service, President Kennedy voiced the feelings of the American public towards their guests from abroad in these words: "We extend to you-and to people everywhere-a cordial invitation to visit the United States. You will find that a warm welcome awaits you. We want you to meet our people.

You will enjoy seeing our homes, our schools, our industries, our farms, and our cities.

"Travelers from the United States have enjoyed friendly hospitality as guests in your country-and in other countries around the world. We offer the same welcome to you to visit us in our homeland.".

THE MEMORIAL honouring Abraham Lincoln is located at the west end of the Mall opposite the Capital in Washington. The statue, photographed here from a scaffold just below the ceiling of the Memorial, is by American sculptor Daniel Chester French.

PT 109 John F. Kennedy:

D~'t~

p-n~ Rs'- ~~

ON

~

Torpedo

f-p

APRIL 25, 1943, a lanky young man of twenty-five assumed his first command in the South Pacific in World War II. He was Lt. (j.g.) John Fitzgerald Kennedy, United States Navy; his command, a patrol torpedo boat-PT I09.

His station was the PT base at Tulagi, near Guadalcanal, in the Solomon Islands. As he moored his small craft under the heavy jungle bushes to conceal her from enemy planes, the key island of Guadalcanal had already been wrested from the Japanese, and the bloody battle for other islands of the Solomon group was raging all around him.

Young Kennedy felt that his assignment to the PT squadron represented the fulfillment of a coveted goal. The PT boats had dash, glamour, speed. Into their eighty-foot plywood hulls-crammed with triple engines, four torpedo tubes, machine guns and an anti-aircraft gun-crowded sun-browned crews so young that a man of thirty seemed elderly. In the Pacific, these plywood pygmies stood up to enemy destroyers and cruisers. Their tactics were hit, run, pray.

The Navy found officers for these whippet-quick craft among athletic young men who had had extensive experience in handling small boats. John Kennedy, Harvard graduate, champion swimmer and sailboat racer, had all the qualifications for the PT service, but he had achieved it only by persistence.

Rejected by the American Army in 1940 because of a back injury suffered in football at Harvard, he had buckled down to remedial exercises and passed a Navy fitness test.

He applied for combat duty after Pearl Harbor, but the Navy seemed determined to keep him on shore assignments.

At officer training school and, later, at the Motor Torpedo

Boat Commander

Robert Donovan's best-selling book, PT 109, from which this episode was taken, is not a new story to American readers. It was first told in I944, long before its hero became President of the United States, in a New Yorker narrative by John Hersey, novelist and distinguished chronicler of many of the dramatic moments of World War II. The story was then, and remains today, deeply moving to every American whose life was touched by the suffering and the tragedies of war. It was especially poignant to those who knew its sequel; one year after the sinking ofPT 109, Joseph Kennedy, Sr., received word that his eldest son-John F. Kennedy's brother-was missing on a bombing mission over Germany from which he never returned.

Training Center, he did so well that he was kept on as an instructor; it was only after he had served with a PT squadron in Panama that the Navy was persuaded to send him to the South Pacific.

The new skipper of PT I09-poised, apparently easygoing, yet reserved-was fresh and ready for action. But PT I09, after eight months of hard service, was a battlescarred, war-weary hulk; three hull patches attested the accuracy of enemy guns; her engines grumbled and balked.

Kennedy began overhauling his boat, assembling his crew-usually twelve men-and training them. By the end of May 1943, PT I09 was shipshape and her skipper and crew felt ready for battle.

As a further step on the long road to Tokyo, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had ordered an invasion of New Georgia in the western Solomon Islands. The New Georgia group consists of hundreds of small islands and several larger ones, including Rendova, Kolombangara, Vella Lavella and New Georgia itself, which is much the largest. On its western tip the Japanese had an important airstrip at Munda.

In mid-July Kennedy received orders to proceed to the forward operating base for motor torpedo boats at Lumberi in Rendova Harbor. Here he could look five miles across Blanche Channel to Munda on New Georgia where soldiers and Marines were then fighting a cruel battle to wrest the airstrip from the Japanese. Northwest of Munda on Kolombangara Island, the enemy held another base-with-airstrip at Vila. Both bases were supplied from the Japanese stronghold farther northwest at Rabaul, on New Britain.

Every afternoon Lt. Commander Warfield, in charge

~o -I ~C? ~o 'bf::, - 1-; ~b~ of the PT fleet at Lumberi, received radio instructions from the Commander of the Third Fleet (CTF) on Guadalcanal.

Then he would summon the PT skippers for orders for the night's patrol. Except for the night of July Igth when two bombs from a Japanese plane pierced the PT above the waterline and hospitalized two of the crew, PT IOg's missions passed without serious mishap.

August 1, 1943, dawned clear, hot and deceptively tranquil. Kennedy and his crew, tired and bleary-eyed after repeated night patrols, expected to have the night off.

Around noon Kennedy brought aboard an old Army 37-mm. anti-tank gun to add to his arsenal and two 2 X 8 planks on which to mount it.

Suddenly the wail of the Rendova siren reached Lumberi and the tat-tat-tat-tat-tat of machine gun fire ripped down through the palm trees as twenty-five enemy planes attacked the PT anchorage. The PTs answered with their anti-aircraft guns. Kennedy ordered the engines of IOg started, shoved his throttles forward to get clear of the concentration of boats and steered through the chaos of the harbor. When the all-clear sounded, he returned to his buoy and rowed ashore for the usual briefing.

Commander Warfield relayed to the skippers the CTF message: INDICATIONS EXPRESS MAY RUN TONIGHT ....

OPERATE MAXIMUM NUMBER PTS. He added that if the express approached Vila from the north of Kolombangara, their usual route, Captain Burke with six destroyers and another PT squadron would sink them. If they came through Blackett Strait and approached Vila from the south, Warfield's PTs were to stop them.

Two of Warfield's PTs had been destroyed by the air attack; of the remainder, fifteen were in satisfactory shape.

Four had primitive radar sets and the Commander formed a division around each of these boats. Each division was given a particular area to cover. Division B, which included 157, 162 and Kennedy's 109, was under the leadership of radar-equipped 15g. They were to patrol the upper end of Blackett Strait farthest from the base.

So PT 109 prepared to shove off with Kennedy's crew of eleven, who ranged in age from nineteen-year-old Harold Marney (he enlisted at seventeen) to "Pop" McMahon, the patriarch of the crew, thirty-seven. They came from Missouri and Ohio, Illinois, Georgia and New York. Bucky Harris, like Marney, was from Kennedy's own state, Massachusetts. Leonard J. Thorn, the executive officer, a twentyfour-year-old blond giant, had been a football tackle at¡ Ohio State University. Edgar Mauer, twenty-eight, had had his first ship sunk under him. At the last minute, Lieutenant Ross, whose PT boat had been sunk ten days before, asked to join the patrol. Kennedy assigned him as lookout and gunner for the 37-mm. gun whose planks had been lashed to the deck with ropes.

In the meantime, three Japanese destroyers were steaming to Vila, where they were due at midnight to put ashore goo soldiers and more than seventy tons of supplies to reinforce the defenders of Munda. A fourth destroyer, the Amagiri, a new gray two-stacker under the command of Lt. Commander Kohei Hanami, hovered about them as an escort, moving up and down the column, her depth charges ready for any American submarine.

They took the route through Blackett Strait.

PT 109 UNDER enemy fire during mission off Guadalcanal.

S N - ~T

There are battles in which nothing goes according to plan; John Kennedy's first big engagement was one of these.

By 9-30 p.m. the fifteen boats from Rendova were on their respective stations, idling in pairs, I09 and 162 following 159 and 157.

Not a star was visible. The night was like tar. They patrolled until after midnight when four luminous spots showed on the radar screen of 159 whose skipper, thinking they were four barges, took off on a lone wolf attack. Its companion 157 followed. No message of the move reached I09 or 162. As 159 moved in to strafe, the Japanese opened fire and 159 released its torpedoes. They not only missed their target, but one of them set fire to the lubricating grease in its tube, lighting up the boat; 157 fired its torpedoes and both PTs raced away from the Japanese guns. As the destroyers moved toward their goal and came into the patrol areas of the other PTs, these also went into action and fired a total of thirty torpedoes none of which hit its mark. Twelve PTs, having exhausted their ammunition, returned to base.

Meanwhile, the Japanese column pushed on without a scratch, arrived at Vila, discharged troops and cargo and started back the way it had come through Blackett Strait.

With th~ir tactical plans scrambled, the three remaining PTs, 169, 162 and Kennedy's I09, assembled and radioed to Rendova base for instructions. On the order to regroup and resume patrol, they formed a column.

None had a radar. Not a man in them knew that four enemy destroyers had passed down Blackett Strait in the darkness and would soon come tearing back. They had interpreted occasional shell flashes as fire from shore batteries. Heading southeast, the direction from which the Japanese Amagiri was steaming at a speed of thirty knots, the column eased along with PT I09 in the lead at about five knots-barely enough headway to maneuver.

"Ship ahead!" a lookout on the Amagiri shouted.

"Ship at two o'clock!" young Marney shouted to Kennedy from the gun turret. A shape was suddenly sculptured out of the darkness behind a phosphorescent bow wave. On the foredeck of PT 109, Ross grabbed a shell and rammed it at the 37-mm. It slammed against a closed breach.

"Fire!" came the order to the petty officer in the Amagiri's forward gun turret. But the destroyer was already so close to the smaller boat that he could not depress the guns in time.

{11'11.-

What followed took place within the span of perhaps forty seconds. Commander Hanami, now recognizing the American vessel as a PT boat, decided that his best tactic would be to ram.

"Hard a-starboard," he called.

"Sound general quarters," ordered Kennedy and spun his wheel in an attempt to make a torpedo attack. But, idling on a single engine, PT 109 was moving too sluggishly to maneuver against the swiftness of the destroyer.

The steel prow of the Amagiri crashed at a sharp angle into the starboard side of PT I09 beside the cockpit. The impact killed young Marney and another crewman, Andrew Kirksey. The wheel was torn from Kennedy's grasp as he was hurled against the rear wall of the cockpit, his oncesprained back slamming against a steel reinforcing brace.

The angle of the collision alone saved him from being crushed to death also. The destroyer, smashing through the gun turret, sliced diagonally behind the cockpit, only several feet from the prostrate skipper. Helplessly looking up, he could see the monstrous hull sweeping past him through his boat, splintering her and cleaving the forepart away from the starboard side of the stern.

Gasoline tanks ignited and a river of fire spread over the water. As the Amagiri swept on she fired two shots back at PT 109, but both missed. The two other PTs cruising behind Kennedy's craft, launched four torpedoes. They also missed. Then, with gasoline flames from the shattered 109 dancing high, they left in the night. Their skippers assumed that nobody could survive the watery inferno.

Actually only two were killed. Eleven, including Kennedy, managed to stay afloat through a nightmare of shock and fire. Caught in the engine room, "Pop" McMahon watched a river of red fire descend on him from the lighted gasoline tanks; then, sucked down when the engines sank, his kapok life jacket brought him to the surface in a sea of fire. Machinist's Mate Johnston's plight was scarcely less desperate. He went down fully clothed, even to steel helmet and heavy combat shoes. Treading upward, he thrashed to the surface and began beating the flames away with his hands.

The five other surviving crew members aft did not have to abandon ship-the stern section plunged to the depths and abandoned them. Several floated unconscious, sustained by their life jackets.

Four others, Kennedy, Ross, radioman Maguire and seaman Mauer, remained on PT I09's bow section, drifting

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[fs - b4-~ I q) among the gasoline flames. Fearing that the bow would explode, Kennedy ordered the men into the water and jumrcd with them. The surface was heavy with gasoline fumes, but waves from the destroyer swept a path through the flames. They swam out a safe distance.

AB the flames around the derelict bow subsided, Kennedy concluded there would be no explosion. He and his companions swam back and climbed aboard. After directing Mauer to flash the blinker, a tube with a signal light inside, as a beacon for any men who might be alive in the water, Kennedy removed his shoes, shirt and sidearms and dived overboard in a rubber !ifebelt to make a personal search.

Except for McMahon and Johnston, the submerged crew made their way back to the boat. Kennedy's water search rounded up these two. Harris, despite an injured leg, kept an eye on McMahon until Kennedy's head appeared out of the dark.

"McMahon is too hurt to swim," Han is told Kennedy.

"All right, I'll take him back-part of the boat is still floating."

Kennedy clutched McMahon's kapok and began towing him toward the boat, calling encouragement to Harris, whose injured leg dragged. Finally, the three reached PT 109'S bow.

Kennedy called the names of hi3 crew. All were present except Kirksey and Marney. Throughout the night Kennedy called out the two names and the others took it up; but there was never any answer.

Nine of the survivors seemed to be in fair condition, but McMahon's hands, face, arms, legs and feet were burned, and Johnston was alternately unconscious and racked by vomiting from the gasoline fumes.

When dawn broke, the survivors took comfort from the sight of Rendova's peak, rising above the nearest United States base, thirty-eight miles to the southeast.

They could imagine other PTs putting out from Lumberi in search of them.

But daylight substituted the dread of exposure for the terror of darkness. The eleven Americans, encircled

by Japanese, could see buildings on Kolombangara and Gizo, only a few miles away. Would the Japanese investigate the floating hulk before rescue arrived?

"What do you want to do," Kennedy asked, "fight or surrender?"

"Fight with what?" someone asked.

They took stock of their weapons-six pistols, Kennedy's .38 caliber revolver, two sheath knives and a pocket knife; also a Thompson sub-machine gun. Let the decision go, they agreed, until they saw how large a force the enemy might send out.

By ten a.m. the bow listed so sharply to starboard that it turned turtle. The men helped McMahon and Johnston onto the upturned bottom. The rest stayed in the water to lessen chance of discovery by enemy lookouts.

The hulk seemed to be settling in the water. It became increasingly evident to Kennedy that if help did not come within a few hours, he would have to order the men to abandon what was left of the boat and swim to shore before dark. But what island large enough to conceal eleven Americans would be free of Japanese?

Kolombangara, about two miles to the east, was a Japanese base, and removed from the normal course of the PT boats. Chances of rescue there would be slight.

About three and a half miles to the west was a group of small islands, well away from the eyes of the Japanese; the reef at their base bordered on Ferguson Passage with its hope of rescue. One of them was Plum Pudding Island, ;:;noval of green about one hundred yards long and seventy yards wide, crowned with tall casuarina trees. Sometime after one p.m. Kennedy gave orders to strike out for Plum Pudding. One of the pair of 2 X 8 planks still floated off the bow on its rope. It would serve, he decided, to keep the men together, since some were better swimmers than others.

"I'll take McMahon with me," he said. "The rest of you can swim together on this plank. Thorn will be in charge."

The men who still had shoes removed them and tied them around the plank. They wrapped the boat's tenpound battle lantern in a spare kapok and tied it to the plank. Then they cut loose with four men on each side of the plank, holding on with one arm and paddling with the other. A ninth man, often Ensign Thorn, pushed or pulled at one end. All kicked.

Kennedy helped the injured man into the water, which stung his burns cruelly. In the back of McMahon's kapok life jacket ran a three-foot strap, now stiff from immersion.

Kennedy slashed loose the end with his knife, clamped the strap between his teeth, and b~gan swimming the breast stroke. He and McMahon were back to back. Kennedy was low in the water under McMahon, who was floating along on his back with his head behind Kennedy's.

Near sundown they drifted onto the clean white sand of Plum Pudding Beach. Kennedy released the tooth-dented end of McMahon's strap from his aching jaws and lay panting, face down, with his feet still in the water. He would have been at the mercy of a single enemy soldier, but the island was deserted.

McMahon, his hands grotesquely swollen, crawled out of the water on his knees and tried to drag his comrade across the exposed beach into the trees. But Kennedy, sick from having swallowed quantities of salt water, began vomiting and collapsed. Finally they managed to climb into the bushes. After a while the men on the plank drew near.

Kennedy waved them on.

Cut and bruised by the coral, the men dragged themselves and the plank up on the beach. It had taken them fully four hours to swim approximately three and a half miles. Kennedy, with McMahon in tow, had made it in slightly better time.

The men ducked under the trees near Kennedy and McMahon, pulled off their kapoks and lay down gasping.

In

THE QUARTER coconut shell on which Kennedy carved St-J' his message to PT base commander.

"3 ~

'14

Hardly a word was spoken. Darkness was approaching.

Wet, hungry, without a drop of drinking water, after some fifteen hours in the salt sea, aching from burns and concussions, the crew of PT log could be thankful for being on dry land-but nothing more.

High on a dark and lonely knob of the jungle on Kolombangara, behind the Japanese lines, Australian coastwatcher Lt. Arthur Reginald Evans had peered into the black void on the night of August 1-2 to see the burning gasoline from PT 109 spreading across the water. He knew that a ship must be on fire.

As a member of a network of several hundred coast watchers, whose military intelligence web spun thinly over more than 500,000 miles of Melanesia, Lt. Evans immediately reported to Guadalcanal every enemy ship or plane or troop movement that his eyes or ears could detect. His hide-away was stocked with rations, radio, map and revolver. He had the help ofloyal native scouts.

Early in the morning of the 2nd, Lt. Evans radioed that a small vessel had been afire and that it was still visible.

He was advised that PT 109 had been lost in action. He replied that the Kolombangara coast would be searched for

survivors, and told his native scouts to pass the word among the islands to be on the lookout for PT boat survivors.

When American planes took up the search at dusk, Kennedy and his men had reached Plum Pudding Island and taken cover under its foliage. They were not visible and were given up for lost.

Hardly had Kennedy and his men reached Plum Pudding when a Japanese barge chugged up Blackett Strait only a couple of hundred yards away. The men crawled on their stomachs into the bushes. The barge moved slowly on.

U it had come only a few minutes earlier, it would have caught Kennedy and his men helpless in the water.

The three officers-Kennedy, Thorn and Ross-conferred. "How are we going to get out of here?" Their theory of rescue boiled down to the idea of intercepting the PT boats that night in Ferguson Passage. Kennedy said that he would swim out into the passage and try to attract their attention with his revolver and battle lantern.

He stripped down to his skivvies, strapped the rubber life belt around his waist, and hung the. 38 from a lanyard around his neck, and wrapped the battle lantern in kapok to float it. With shoes to protect his feet from the coral, he stepped into the water. Stumbling, slipping, swimming along the two to three miles of reef, he finally reached Ferguson Passage; here he treaded water hoping to sight the PTs. As the hours passed and none appeared, he concluded that they had gone this night up Gizo Strait. They had. When dawn came he had just enough strength to make it back as far as Leorava, a closer island, where he collapsed in deep slumber.

During the night a shower drenched Plum Pudding and the thirsty men licked the leaves. Nagged by hunger and thirst, Mauer climbed a tall palm and twisted off three unripe coconuts which yielded a warm, bland, fluid. The men had given Kennedy up for lost when, late in the morning, he swam in from the reef and fell to the beach. Thorn and Ross dragged him into the bushes.

That night Ross, making an earlier start, made the swim to Ferguson Passage. Again no PT boats. Again they patrolled up Gizo Strait.

When Ross returned the next day, he found Kennedy with a show of optimism encouraging his dispirited men.

But McMahon's condition was pitiable. Scabs forming over his burned eyelids made it difficult for him to see. His hands were swollen and cracked. The men were hungry. It was now Wednesday, and their last meal had been on Sunday.

Partly because it promised more coconuts and partly because it was nearer Ferguson Passage, Kennedy decided to move to another island, Olasana. Again the men swam with the plank; again Kennedy took the strap of McMahon's kapok in his teeth and towed him. Arrived, they ate coconuts and some became sick. By dark all were weary from the swim. For the first time in three nights no one went into Ferguson Passage. For the first time in three nights the PTs came through Ferguson Passage.

Although Thursday, August 5th, was a day of gratification for the Allies because Munda fell, it dawned bleakly for the castaways on Olasana. Kennedy was restless. He looked across at Naru Island, half-a-mile away. "Let's take a look at it," he said to Ross. The swim across was easy.

Offshore they found the wreckage of a small Japanese vessel with remains of its cargo. With the greedy curiosity of beachcombers, they ripped open a crate, which to their delight contained hard candy. Nearby they found a dugout. canoe with a tin of rainwater-one of the caches left by native scouts. They sat down and drank sparingly.

With the canoe, Kennedy now felt much more mobile.

He tore slats off the crate for paddles, and decided to venture into Ferguson Passage again that night, believing he would have a better chance of intercepting the PT boats in a canoe.

But first he would take the candy and water back to the men on Olasana.

"thanks, I've just had a coconut" While Kennedy and Ross were finding booty on Naru, two native scouts were paddling in a dugout canoe through Blackett Strait. They were ebony-colored Melanesians, around nineteen years old, who had attended Methodist Mission schools before the war and were loyal to the Allies. Thirsty from the long paddle, they turned in to Olasana for coconuts.

When the nine on the island saw the canoe approaching, they were stunned. Who were these natives? Would they inform the Japanese? Should the Americans stand up? Should they hide? Should they fire on them? Thorn made a fateful decision; in a gamble that involved all their lives, he stood up and walked out.

The sudden apparition of the bedraggled giant with the blonde beard astounded Biuku and Eroni. In fright they back-paddled. Thorn ran to the water's edge and called, "Come, come." They paused to listen. "Navy, Navy," Thorn pleaded. "Me no Jap," and rolled up his sleeve to show his white skin. Still no response from Biuku and Eroni. Then Thorn had an inspiration.

"White star," he said pointing to the sky. "White star."

At last Biuku and Eroni were reassured. The insignia on American aircraft was a white star. The friendly natives had been instructed to aid all airmen who crashed or parachuted from white-star planes.

The survivors helped Biuku and Eroni drag their canoe ashore and conceal it under the palm trees. The natives' English was rudimentary, but little by little they and the Americans learned to communicate, and made plans for rescue. Thorn decided that he with one of his crew and one of the natives would try the long, hard paddle to Rendova Harbor. But once outside the reef they ran into heavy seas and were forced to return.

About the'same time Kennedy arrived from Naru and, undaunted by Thorn's experience, decided that he and Ross would try again to make it to Ferguson Passage.

Arrived in the Passage, they found that the waves that had turned the first boat back were now smashing over the reef and the wind was rising. A five-foot wave capsized the canoe. Another swing of the sea hurled the two men and the canoe over the reef and into the shallows. The canoe survived and the paddles floated nearby. They made it to the Naru beach, lay down in exhaustion and slept.

Meanwhile the PTs rolled through the heavy seas of Ferguson Passage to their stations.

When morning brought calm seas, Kennedy decided that the only way to get help would be to send Biuku and Eroni all the way to Lumberi with word of their plight. On a coconut shell with his sheath knife, he scratched the following message to the PT base commander: NATIVE KNOWS POSITION HE CAN PILOT I I ALIVE NEED SMALL BOAT KENNEDY When he arrived back at Olasana, he discovered that Thorn had had the same idea. With the stub of a pencil and a waterlogged piece of paper, he had written a more formal note.

So, armed with both messages, Biuku and Eroni embarked on the thirty-eight-mile paddle to Rendova Harbor.

On the way they stopped off to send word of the survivors by other native scouts to Lt. Evans, who had moved his base from Kolombangara to Gomu, a small island in the middle of Blackett Strait.

By the morning of August 7th, the rescue was under way. Biuku and Eroni reached the PT base; Evans relayed the news he had received from his scouts. The coast-watcher dispatched a canoe with seven natives and food and an official message to Kennedy, advising him to return in the canoe to Gomu so they could make rescue plans together.

The canoe was a cornucopia. Before the gluttonous eyes of eleven famished sailors, yams, pawpaws, rice,

potatoes, boiled fish, cigarettes and C-rations with meat poured ashore. When the meal was over, Kennedy lay down in the canoe, covered with palm fronds to conceal him from the enemy. As the canoe passed through the reef into Blackett Strait, he looked back for landmarks so he could recognize the opening in the dark. Halfway to Gomu three Japanese planes circled above them. Stricken with fear the natives paddled on. As the planes flew off, the natives burst into hymns of rejoicing and thanks.

When the canoe touched the sand at Gomu, Kennedy stuck his head through the palm fronds and smiled at Evans.

(),

~ BIUKU AND ERONI re-enact part they played in ;) discovery and rescue of PT 109 crew.

"Hello," he said. "I'm Kennedy." Evans suggested that Kennedy proceed on to Rendova in the native canoe while PT boats went to pick up his men. Kennedy di.sagreed; it would be impossible, he argued, for anyone who did not know the exact passage through the reef to locate the men and, further, he felt it was his duty to see them to safety.

So Evans radioed Lumberi that Kennedy would be paddled by the natives to a rendezvous with the PT boat and would guide it to Olasana. The recognition signal agreed upon was four shots. The signals were exchanged on schedule and the canoe glided to the starboard side of PT 157.

"Hey, Jack!" a voice called, "we've got some food for you."

"Thanks," Kennedy replied, "I've just had a coconut."

It was after midnight when the PT guided by Kennedy found the survivors. Within a short time they had been taken aboard and on Sunday morning they curved into Rendova Harbor, singing at the tops of their voices .•

Š

1961 by Robert ). Donovan.

LOCATED AT Times Square in New York City, this paperback store is open twenty-four hours a day.

•

Read i ng Revol ut Ion

ALMOST A quarter of a century after their successful launching, paperback books continue to be the wonder of the U.S. publishing world.

These inexpensive and compact volumes-described by author Marchette Chute as "the greatest achievement in portability since the invention of the sandwich"-have not only revolutionized the publishing business and the reading habits of millions, but are still demonstrating that there are no limits to the public's eagerness for stimulating and informative reading matter if it is made available in a

convenient format at modest prices.

To meet-and if possible to anticipate-this demand is the aim of an increasing number of book publishers.

As the statistics for 1962 indicate, paperbacks are still growing in volume and still exploring new ways of serving the public. According to the book industry journal Publishers' Weekh', paperbacks accounted for thirty-one per cent of all books published in the United States, compared to fourteen per cent in each of the two previous years. The latest edition of Paperbound Books in Print lists 19,500 titles-

ONCE EXPENSIVE books on the fine arts are now available at low prices. Customers are encouraged to browse. Some shops serve free coffee.

MORE THAN /9,500 titles are now published in paperback editions.

Reading Revolution an increase of 4,500 during 1962.

The number of paperback publishers increased by twenty-three, raising the total to 223.

Expansion also occurred in merchandising: forty-three of the 159 new bookshops opened in 1962 specialize in paperbacks, while overall sales rose by three per cent. More than a million paperbacks are sold each day in the United States in 195,000 massmarket outlets-such as newsstands, supermarkets and cigar stands- 1,700 bookshops, 1,800 college bookstores and an estimated 3,000 paperback shops in secondary schools.

In countries where books normally are available in both hard cover and paperback form, this interest in paperbound books may seem puzzling.

But in the United States the paperbacks are a significant barometer of public taste.

At first most of the paperbacks were frankly purveyors of adventure and romance. Blazing guns, flashing knives and alluring ladies decorated their covers, and their contents usually were equally extravagant. Discriminating readers turned their backs

on these gaudy book displays.

Nowadays these same devotees of literature are flocking to the racks of paperbound books that can be found almost everywhere, not because they are any less discriminating, but because a quiet revolution has taken place in paperback fare during the last decade.

It was in April, 1953, that a courageous publisher hopefully offered the public Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma and eleven other quality paperbacks at prices somewhat higher than those prevailing at the massmarket level. Sceptics predicted failure for the venture but book-lovers across the country soon proved them wrong. It did not take long for other publishers to follow suit, and today most of the paperback firms deal in quality books.

The extent to which these higher priced paperbacks have asserted themselves is made evident by recent industry statistics. In 196 I the cheaper, mass-market paperback represented fifty-seven per cent of all paperbound output but declined in 1962 to twenty-six per cent. Even these figures

THE UBIQUITOUS PAPERBACK may be purchased almost everywhere.

f~-71. 7

I

5

are deceptive, for many of the books distributed to the mass-market are far from "popular" in content. William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Theodore H. White's The Making of the President and Nobel Prizewinner John Steinbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent are only a few of the distinguished works high on last year's mass-market bestseller lists. .

Naturally, the old staples also were represented-Western novels, mysteries, tales of romance, inspirational works and "how-to-do-it" books. But significantly, an increasing number of serious books are being published and purchased in paperback form.

Today there is hardly an area of thought or activity not dealt with in paperback books, from archaeology to world affairs, and the percentage of paperback books devoted to serious subjects increases yearly. In 1962, paperbacks accounted for almost onethird of all books on art, business, education, sociology, law, economics, languages, medicine and philosophy.

Slightly behind them were paper-

a million paperbacks

COMMUTERS FIND the paperback's convenient size and weight a boon.

sold each day

Reading

Revolution

bound books on history, religion, biography and science.

An important role in popularizing paperbacks has been played by institutions of higher learning. Many people first acquired the habit of reading paperbound books in college.

Instead of buying a minimum number of expensive hard-cover books or awaiting their turn at the college library, they bought a whole shelf of recommended paperbacks at the college bookstore.

A natural consequence has been a healthy change in the reading habits of college students as well as adults attending evening classes. Many home libraries have developed in just this manner.

The same phenomenon has been observed among teen-agers. Within the last year or two some 3,000

secondary schools from coast to coast have opened their own paperback bookshops, most of them operated by students under the supervision of a librarian or a teacher.

Increasing attention also is being paid by paperback publishers to the reading needs of younger children.

Paperbound books have found their way into the libraries of some elementary schools, and librarians have noticed that children are more attracted to them than to bulkier hardcover books.

In all age groups, millions of people whose previous contact with the world of good books was limited or even non-existent, have discovered the rewards of stimulating and informative reading through paperbacks. Their interest in turn spurs publishers to ever new ventures on expanded horizons .•

PS-7~7 ~ IIJ increases her kitchen Italian recipes.

YOUNG HOUSEWIFE

skill with book

of

SN-~1 }" C11 BEN KAMIHIRA'S

Young

Man

when the artist and the beholder are so often remote from each other in terms of experience-but, rather, it is positive evidence of human involvement with nature and with other human beings. The act of producing such evidence to which the beholder may react in his own way appears to be the valid function of art.

For me, what I might call the Theory of Events and Responses makes it easier to face the complex images of modern art than if I hold the popular view that art must communicate. If I adhere to the latter view, I am bound to seek the precise intent of the artist (sometimes an impossible task); if I accept the former, I am on my own ground, the artist is on his. There is no problem.

This abstractly philosophical exposi-

tion may help explain my approach as sole juror for this exhibit. In limiting my selection to sixty paintings, chosen from the seven or eight thousand I looked at, I had to rely fairly strictly on my own responses. Nevertheless, I made every effort to see as much of contemporary work as possible and to remain as objective as possible without a preconceived theme, preference for style, or prejudice of any sort.

One thing that has impressed me is that, with minor exceptions, the almost startling innovations in technique and imagery which followed the Second World War seem hardly to have occurred in the last four years. The period 1958-1962 appears to be a period of consolidation; individual variations are plentiful, but along lines which have atready been drawn. I note that

this breath-catching operation has been accompanied by a greater sense of structural order than generally pertained a decade ago. Sometimes it is found in the anatomy of representational subject matter, sometimes in. a more geometric ordering of surface.

There is, I think, less emotional impatience, more intellectual control.

A second point: although I looked for paintings that would be modest in size for the sake of convenience in handling, I found, again and again, that the larger the picture the more monumental and convincing the work.

I was guided by what I found. There are some very large paintings on display. The large painting is no longer a painting on an e-asel, or even on a wall. It is, in relation to the scale of a human being, a wall itself.

Critic's

Choice These two observations-the greater rational rather than emotional control and the mural character of so many paintings-lead, in turn, to a third: the "thinginess" (objectivity would be the ordinary word except that it implies a detachment I don't find) of many of the paintings. I refer here to the isolation of the image within the rectangular area of the painted surface rather than the organization of the entire area into ordered components.

I think of such paintings as those by Adolph Gottlieb and (in a representational way) Joseph Jeswald, as well as hundreds of others not included in the exhibit which reveal this insistent nuclear sense of order. What do I make of it? A new awareness of realities that are to be discovered within more obvious realities.

Here, I think, it is pcssible to trace a historical evolution from the nineteenth century picture (a window looking out on nature) to Cubism (the emphasis on surface actualities, but still a composition within the rectangle ofthe picture) to the later expressionist involvement with an image that developed without previous plan (but in which the entire rectangle was still occupied) to this "thinginess" (which is perhaps the only marked innovation of the past four years).

The transition from the type of painting which was a window on life, in the nineteenth century idiom, to painting that insists on its own aesthetic reality as a thing-not as an illusion, nor as a symbol-is to be observed in a slightly different form in canvases wherein the material texture of the surface is an important element of the composition. Examples in the present exhibit are paintings (it is almost necessary to put the word in quotes so far are they removed from painting concepts of a century ago) by Gyorgy Kepes, Enrico Donati and Robert Mallary.

I must also note, as a significant technical development, the differing methods of alluding to space while yet retaining a two-dimensional pictorial actuality-for example, the vibrant colour juxtapositions in the painting

by Hannes Beckmann. In a manner quite apart from the spatial positions taken by colours in a Cezanne painting, there seems to be among certain painters a new sense of spatial translucency which is more nearly allied to the penetrating revelations of the microscope or telescope than to normal experiences of the naked eye. This preoccupation with light also seems to have evolved during the past four years. I have in mind, for example, the reflecting surfaces to be found in the paintings by Tseng Yu-Ho and others.

One passing observation-I have noticed on every hand how many

JO;N

"Jo~H~ L~~o~ .!

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Kraushaar Galleries, New York.

End

of

Day

painters now develop the surfat:e"in relief as if the true aesthetic reality is to be found in sculptural qualities.

Yet, paradoxically, sculptors tend towards two-dimensional silhouettes rather than massive forms. This raises the interesting question of how far the tendency to merge opposites will go.

Looking back, I am struck by the fact that in general this exhibit contains less purely abstract work than did previous exhibitions in this series.

Does this imply that there is a reversion to representational painting and that the interest in the abstract has run its course? I don't think so for two reasons: First, I have sought representational works out of personal interest, and it has required some search on my

part to find them out. I admire conventional realism when it turns up adroitly and aesthetically handled, as in the skilful studio interior by John Koch and the informal but impressive portrait of a youth by Ben Kamihira, among others. Second, and I think more important as a reason that the abstract idiom has not run its course, is the fact that modern society is very much motivated by complex, intangible forces-that is, abstractions. As long as these forces exert a dominant influence, I suspect that artists will respond sensitively to them; and the extent to which society itself becomes aware of them will be the extent to which modern art will be a language that is understood .•

~-lr4/~

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