For & By Teen-Agers

The country's 24 million teen-agers do not lack for magazines aimed directly at their age group. Coed, Dig, 'Teen, Fifteen, Seventeen, Teen Talk, Teenage Times and Ingenue--the varied titles add up to several dozen, but they all share a common trait: they are published by adults who may or may not have retained their passports to the juvenile mind. Last week in Denver, newsstands displayed a newcomer to the list: a teen-age magazine that is put out by teenagers.

At a skinny 20 pages, Tempo cast no greater shadow than a high school freshman at the beach. But it had a commendably professional sheen, and its contents sought to grapple with some of the problems and interests of its peers: a Denver boy's account of how it feels to be a high school dropout, a page of verse composed by an 18-year-old girl, a random assortment of teenage views on public school integration. All this may not have looked like serious competition to the call of the juke joint, but the first run of 5,000 copies sold briskly at 25-c- each.

Tempo is the extracurricular work of two honor students at Denver's George Washington High School, Harold Goldberg, 18, and Richard Gould, 17. It was started on the strength of an earlier publishing success: the boys cleared $57 on a tabloid newspaper they sold throughout the city's eight high schools. To start their magazine, Goldberg and Gould first signed up 570 advance subscriptions, hustled ads from local merchants and talked the printer into a $200 loan. Tempo's debut absorbed all $720 of the starting capital, but Goldberg and Gould are already laying out two more issues.

Come fall, the magazine will face a crisis that is surely unique in the annals of periodical publishing: both of its proprietors have to go back to school. "We hope to sell Tempo to someone with enough money to carry on," said young Goldberg hopefully. "Probably an adult who'll hire teen-agers to put it out. I don't think any adult could run Tempo." Added young Gould somewhat more realistically: "That's right. But we'll sell to anybody."

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