Gentlemen of the Press

In the fall of 1927 The Sportsman, a monthly for gentlemen, was less than one year old. President-Editor Richard Ely Danielson wagered with his advertising staff: "When you succeed in selling 100 pages of advertising in a single issue, I will give you a champagne dinner." Last week in a Manhattan club, champagne corks popped in salute to 102 pages of advertising in the May Sportsman. A joyful loser, Editor Danielson toasted his admen. A graceful winner, Chief Adman Ralf Coykendall called the hundred-mark but a milestone.

Unique in its tone, The Sportsman is not for the ringside habitue, not for the occasional "hunter" who combs the hills once each year for a legal maximum bag of game, not for the bleacher authority on batting averages. Its rich illustrations depict gentlemen riders taking jumps handsomely: "Mr. Lewis Lacey . . . leads Mr. Hopping over the boards in the third match at Meadow Brook"; a priest blessing the hounds of Chagrin Valley Hunt Club before the chase.

The very casual presentation of exotic subject indicates how far aloof is The Sportsman's clientele from the mass of U. S. readers: "The Business of Cricking," "Badminton Takes Hold," "Alligators for Sport," "The Scientific Sport of Bird Banding," "In Praise of the Bilgeboard Scow." In the May issue, with a display of pride such as attends an epochal event, The Sportsman presents its "scoop": complete data and sail plans of Sir Thomas Lipton's challenging Shamrock V and the four U. S. contenders for the honor of defending the America's Cup in September--material never before divulged in advance of the race.

The Sportsman circulation, necessarily limited, is guaranteed 15,000. While about 18,000 copies are delivered, no effort is made to swell that number. At the age of two the magazine began to make money. Distinctive as the magazine is The Sportsman staff, principal names of which appear in Boston and Manhattan Social Registers. Editor Danielson, chief founder, may add to his signature the initials M. F. H.--Master of Fox Hounds of Groton Hunt Club. (The Sportsman is the official organ of the Master of Fox Hounds Association, representing 70 clubs.) His forefathers settled Danielson, Conn., in 1707.

A certain disdain of "games" as opposed to "sports" is reflected in Mr. Danielson's editorials and his "Leaves from a Sportsman's Notebook," monthly feature of the magazine. Says he: "Sport, by every decent definition, is confined to man's contest with wild life or nature. It has nothing to do with man's competition with man--except in those cases where nature . . . decides--in the last analysis--the issue." To Sportsman Danielson football, golf, tennis, trapshooting, are games; foxhunting, sailing, mountaineering--Sports.

Principal aides to Sportsman Danielson are Christian A. Herter, Harvard 1915, of Boston, who winters on his family's South Carolina plantation; and Business Manager Powell Mason Cabot, Harvard 1918, of that branch of the historic family which seven years ago vainly sued to prevent a Philadelphia family of Kabatchniks from becoming Cabots (TIME, APRIL 12, 1926). All three were associated for four years as editors and manager of Independent, weekly opinion sheet, until it was merged with Outlook. Managing Editor Frank A. Eaton, responsible for the rich appearance of The Sportsman, leaves to take a similar position on Holiday, a monthly publication to be published in October by the American Automobile Association.

The Sportsman's contributors are nearly all non-professional writers, mostly men and women of wealth--eager to write of the sports on which they may be authorities. Riding far afield from the game-getters (Field & Stream, etc.) and from the magazines for idle gentlefolk (Town & Country., The Spur, etc.), the gentlemen of the Press who run The Sportsman have tried the fence into a field of distinctly sporting aristocracy and cleared it neatly.

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