Gentlemen All

In the fall of 1932 a jobless salesman named Mortimer Glankoff, who was eating on a borrowed $100, began distributing to Manhattan's West Side apartment dwellers a 12-page throwaway called Naborhood Theatre Guide. Salesman Glankoff had a trusting printer and he got doormen to distribute his Guide by bribing them with movie passes. Within a year he was selling enough advertising to hire as editor one Jesse Zunser, a footloose free lancer whose candid comments on plays and films soon gave Naborhood Theatre Guide a small reputation among half-a-dozen similar guides. By 1934 Glankoff's little sheet had spread to the East Side, had a few hundred subscribers at $1 a year, had changed its name to Cue.

All of a sudden the magazine was taken up by a bunch of sporting socialites and began going great guns. Oliver Davis ("Three Dagger") Keep, who had been promotion manager of The Conde Nast Publications Inc., bought control and, later joined by a rich college (Williams) friend named Archbold Van Beuren, began promoting Cue all over the Metropolitan area. Now a 58-page "Weekly Magazine of New York Life," jamful of information about everything from radio programs to de luxe cruises, Cue this week became a full-size (7 7/8 x 11 1/4 in.) magazine and published its first national edition. The national edition went out to some 9,000 out-of-town subscribers who had been taking the Manhattan edition.

Cue has so far paid no dividends, has cost President Keep & friends "something less" than $400,000. Revenue has all gone into expansion and promotion; plump, curly Dave Keep hopes eventually to have something that will rival the New Yorker. "If we need more money, we'll put it in," says he.

Most of Cue's editors have a little money in the magazine, a little more money of their own, work for salaries averaging around $75 a week. They pride themselves on being sportsmen, compete madly at tennis, squash, billiards, chess. President Keep's dream: a gymnasium for Cue, where every male of his 80 employes would be compelled to take at least one hour's exercise every day. One of Cue's female employes describes the organization as "a casual kind of place, so friendly and full of gentlemen."

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