RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

86 | denis beckett
frONTLINe MaGaZINe credit-line that we agreed on often
ended up as a tiny mystery (Frontline) tacked on to the end. But it
cheated readers. Why subscribe to a small journal when much
of it appeared in big ones that you read anyway? Still, when
a metropolitan editor rang to bespeak this article or that, I
mainly succumbed – vanity, maybe – and divided the fee with
the author.
real income was advertisements. a full-page ad might bring
in more than fifty annual subs, or twenty-odd lifting fees, and
the advertising world was almost at the point of the great
breakthrough, always.
Then, late in 1982 a strong young rugger-bugger came to my
office and announced that he was going make both of us rich
by selling ad-space.
I didn’t know Paul Hofmeyr, though his family were famed as
high achievers of the first water. Paul’s main achievement so far
had been full-back for Transvaal. Now he was going to succeed
in a new way. Frontline was the vehicle. I said he was crazy; he’d
soon be impaled on the political petard. He said no, quality will
out. anyway he was going to start a rugby magazine, too, and
that would balance things; nothing’s more patriotic than rugby. I
said give it a go. Don’t expect a salary but take a fat commission.
Paul gave it a go. I’d underestimated him; he didn’t get
as far as he’d thought but he got a long way further than I’d
thought.
Most of our ads were “socially responsible” – which is to say
not so much selling something to someone but showing the
world that the company was a good citizen. Typically, a cute
black child and a cute white child shared a sandwich or a swing.
I appreciated these ads, make no mistake, and was 100% on
board the sentiments. But often they were so cutesy they could
make your eyes cross.
One was truly brilliant; a spread from control Data. Page
1 was a model bicycle made from scraps of wire, a thing that
black kids made fluently while their white contemporaries
were working out how to open the Lego box. Page 2 was a