Hero Business

High in a Manhattan office building last week a tall, white-haired man proudly thumbed three dummy paperbacked books. Vivid covers proclaimed them Vol. I, No. 1 of Swift Story Magazine (It Fits Your Pocket), The Pocket Magazine and The Dime Novel. First of the three was ready for publication this week. But it was The Dime Novel, scheduled to appear next month, which brought a reflective smile to the white-haired man--William Gilbert Patten ("Burt L. Standish"), author of the famed old time Frank Merriwell series, now venturing for the first time as his own publisher.

Like the Tip-Top Library, which for two decades purveyed a weekly heroism of the peerless Merriwell, The Dime Novel will concern itself with the adventures of one character. Aware that juvenile readers of today demand something more salty than prep school pranks and last-minute football victories, Author Patten cast about for a 1930 setting for his hero. The result: "Bob Hunter, or The Boss of the Rum Runners." Because, like Merriwell, Bob Hunter must be of eminently sterling worth, he will be enmeshed in illegal activities against his will, his conscience and his judgment. Many of the episodes will deal with the persistent efforts of this Robin Hood to go straight. Crime must not pay.

Author Patten will not tell his age. He was 17 sometime in the 1880's when, at his home in Corinna, Maine, he wrote his first stories, "A Bad Man" and "The Pride of Sandy Flat." A check for $6 for both, from Editor Orville J. Victor of Banner Weekly, put an end to Patten's father's determination, to make Willie a carpenter, and his mother's hope that he would become a minister. In the next ten years Author Gilbert Flatten (he had dropped his first name because people called him Willie) achieved no little success as a prolific writer of western thrillers for the Beadle & Adams publications. He was nearing the end of his rope of ideas when in 1895 Street & Smith, publishers, proposed the juvenile series about a single character who "should have a name like Dick Lightheart, Jack Harkaway, Gay Dashleigh." Author Patten, aspiring to be a playwright, seized upon the plan as a "potboiler." He conceived his hero: "His face was frank, open and winning but the merry light that . . . dwelt in his eyes. . . ." Frank Merriwell was born April 18, 1896.

As a potboiler the Merriwell series soon got out of hand. At the age of three months its weekly circulation was 75,000. Merriwell was to become what the author hoped--the hero of practically every youngster in the U. S, At the peak of his career Author Patten believes, a half-million schoolboys read him every week (many out of sight of parental eyes). Every week for 18 years Author Patten (under the name of "Burt L. Standish" so that others might carry on after him, or in case of illness) ground out 20,000 words. At first he was paid $50 a week, never more than $150, despite a legend that Merriwell made him rich. He is probably the most prolific writer in the U. S. He estimates he has so far written about 40 million words.

It was after entering Frank in Yale that Author Patten realized he could not go on with homeruns and touchdowns forever. His readers knew a college course lasted only four years; the hero would have to grow up. To spar for time, Author Patten allowed Frank to be forced out of college by a dirty trick of an enemy, sent him to work on a railroad, to settle strikes and rout trainrobbers for a few years.

With Frank safely out of the way, resourceful Author Patten dug up a long lost halfbrother, theretofore unheard of --Dick Merriwell. But Dick could not begin to measure up to the incomparable Frank. Whereas Frank could make a baseball curve in two directions, Dick was only ambidextrous.

Ultimately Author Patten bowed to the inevitable, let Frank grow to manhood and marry Inza Burrage (the brunette; the blonde was Elsie Bellwood). Even as head of the Bloomfield Academy for wayward boys, Frank had lost his grip. In 1914 Author Patten broke off what he calls "the longest serial story ever written." The Burt L. Standish torch was passed in turn to William Almon Woolf, William Wallace Cook and John H. Whitson, all of Street & Smith's Tip Top Weekly. They gave the world Frank Merriwell Jr. but he was a feeble shadow of his glorious father.

Author Patten then went to Los Angeles and wrote scenarios. One, for Vitagraph, was played by Norma Talmadge and Maurice Costello. But he returned East after six months because the studios would pay him no more than $60 apiece for his "shorts," from which he could make much more in fiction form. Back in New York Author Patten found himself without a market. No editor would believe him capable of anything but the Merriwell routine. To prove his versatility he turned out stories for Macfadden's True Story Magazine, for Snappy Stories, Saucy Stories, etc. "It made me pretty sick," said he, "but the editors were convinced. It won me a market for adult adventure stuff."

The Andree Story (Cont'd)

Hearst newshawks are resourceful. Hearst money, pinched to the point of substituting waste newsprint for paper towels in employes' washrooms, is fairly squandered to obtain a good "exclusive." Hence, last week, Hearstpapers ran away with the story of the Andree polar balloon expedition of 1897 (TIME, Sept. 8).

Among the vessels chartered to intercept the sealer Brattvaag, on its way from White Island to Tromsoe, Norway with the bodies and relics of the Andree party, was the Isbjoern, hired jointly by Hearst's King Features Syndicate & Universal Service and the Stockholm Dagens Nyheter. Groping about Barents Sea the Isbjoern, with Reporter Knutt Stubbendorff and a photographer aboard, learned by radio that the Brattvaag had already reached Hasvik where an army of newsmen was besetting Dr. Gunnar Horn for the full story of his find, especially the Andree diary. Also the Isbjoern learned, only the bodies of Salomon August Andree and Nils Strindberg had been found. Knut Fraenkel's bones were still missing. Certain that items of value had been overlooked, Hearst officers radioed Reporter Stubbendorff to push on to White Island.

Last week while other agencies were wrangling with the Swedish government for release of the Andree diary, Hearst-papers were full of the discoveries of Reporter Stubbendorff, now become "The Hearst-Dagens Nyheter Expedition."

In a hut rudely fashioned of driftwood against the base of a cliff, Stubbendorff and his diggers found the clothed skeleton of Fraenkel.

Reporter Stubbendorff's party had to fight off polar bears, shot five while they collected from the camp a sledge, oars, snowshoes, remnants of the balloon basket, boats, unopened food tins, ammunition, sleeping bag, instruments, clothing, a roll of exposed photograph film, a gold fruit knife, medicines, a white dress-cravat, etc. etc. Then they found a skull, probably that of Andree.* But best of all they found Strindberg's diary.

Detailed extracts from the diary, radioed from the Isbjoern and relayed by cable (the whole assignment will cost "well into five figures") said the balloon landed three days after taking off from Spitsbergen, that the party then struggled for two months over Arctic ice floes before sighting the glaciers of White Island. To celebrate the finding of land they toasted the King of Sweden and Norway in 1836 wine which he had given them. A month later, although food and ammunition were still plentiful, the men were dead. Guessers last week guessed they 1) froze to death; 2) were poisoned by eating bear liver; 3) were killed by polar bears.

In Tromsoe the Swedish gunboat Svenskimd waited with the bodies of Andree and Strindberg for the Isbjoern to arrive with Fraenkel's remains, when it would conduct all three to Stockholm.

New Orleanian

To the list of cities where, since the success of The New Yorker, local weekly smartchart, have been started, last fortnight was added New Orleans./- Like most of its contemporaries, The New Orleanian candidly follows The New Yorker pattern. Its first issue showed care of preparation, uncommon taste in typographical layout. Most famed contributor: Roark Whitney Wickliffe Bradford, author of Ol' Man Adam & His Chillun (source of Marc Connelley's Pulitzer prize play, The Green Pastures). Instead of "The Talk of the Town" (New Yorker), the New Orleanian's first pages were headed "Uptown-Downtown-Back of Town." Instead of a "Profile" (New Yorker) the New Orleanian presented a biographical sketch called a "Closeup." First subject: Rabbi Louis Binstock, past president of the Rotary Club, but "Rabbi, not Babbitt," "most popular purveyor of religion in New Orleans," whose Friday-night talks on books and such are "the nearest approach to culture this city boasts."

Macfaddle

Publisher Bernarr Macfadden's feelings are hurt by any suggestion that he or any of his publications are pornographic. They are, says he, dedicated to good health, sound living, clean fun.

A front-page headline of last fortnight in Publisher Macfadden's New York Graphic (evening tabloid): "Girls Need Sex Life for Beauty."

A Graphic headline last week: "Rudy Vallee Not So Hot In Love's Arms."

*Photographs taken by the Horn party on White Island, enlarged last week by the Associated Press, show what appears to be a skull lying in plain view on the ground. How the photographer could have failed to see it puzzled newsmen.

/-The list: Boston (The Bostonian), Buffalo (Town Tidings), Chicago (The Chicagoan), Cleveland (The Bystander), San Francisco (The San Franciscan).

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