1953–54 Volume 78 No 1–5 - Phi Delta Theta Scroll Archive

THE SCROLL of Phi Delta Theta for May, 1954 397
giving up come June. "I suggested that I
would like to have a job with the Saturday
Evening Post, since I felt then, as I do now,
that it's more of an honor to work for the
Post than any other publication, and that
the prestige deriving from being a member
of the Post staff is an entree into any place,
high or low."
Through Graeme Lorimer (whom "Slim"
Steele, a classmate and Brother Phi, calls
"Red," and who had been editor of the
Red and Blue at Pennsylvania when Pete
was its art editor, and who is a son of
George Horace Lorimer, then editor of the
Post), Pete was granted an interview with
Mr. Lorimer.
"After talking to me for a while," Pete
says, "Mr. Lorimer offered me a job on the
Post. 1, in turn, offered to go to work for
the Post in June when I finished one more
semester at Pennsylvania. 'If you want this
job you'll take it now,' Mr. Lorimer told
me. 'I know why you want to go back to
Pennsylvania. You just want to run on the
track team.'
"I was in love, I wanted to get married,
I wanted to work for the Post, so I gave up
my plan to return to the university and
went to work for the Post instead. I've often
wondered what would have happened if I
had taken a stronger stand and had refused
to come to the Post until June. I'll never
know. The trouble was, I didn't know
whether Mr. Lorimer was bluffing or not,
and I didn't want to take the chance.
"Quite understandably," Pete reflects,
"those at the University of Pennsylvania
thought that I used them as a cat's paw in
getting the job, and I was in the dog house
on the campus for a long time after that."
Pete's first years on the Post were spent
reviewing "second-class manuscripts." This
is slang peculiar to Post editors \\hich,
in effect, classifies such manuscripts as those
which come from the thousands of housewives,
elevator men, and college English
graduates who would like to become professional
writers. "First-class" manuscripts
are those which come to the Post, and to
other top-flight publications, from author's
agents, writers who had previously made
the magazine, or from book publishers.
When the woman who was Art Editor left
to get married in 1930, Pete took her place.
He regarded this as merely a change in occupation;
not really a promotion, since he'd
been listed on the masthead as an Associate
Editor. His first by-line article appeared in
the Post in 1939.
In a candid appraisal, Pete says, "The
real truth about my accomplishments as art
editor is that I was never really art editor.
The two editors for whom I worked in the
art department, Lorimer and Stout, were
both the actual art editors. In fact, I
worked up a roaring case of stomach ulcers
in my battle with and for the Post format."
During his tenure as Art Editor, however,
the Post title type was changed from
the old-style gray type to solid black, and
such modern touches as bleed pages and
color, both two and four-color, were injected.
Pete became a whole-time staff-writer in
1942, when Ben Hibbs succeeded Wesley
Stout as Post Editor. When Hibbs took
over, a succession of changes were made, the
first of which became physically apparent in
the issue of May 30, 1942. Describing these
changes, Ashley Halsey, Jr., in his official
Short History of The Saturday Evening
Post, refers to the "amazing metamorphosis
(which saw) W. Thornton (Pete) Martin,
who had been art editor under Stout,
(switching) to a writing editorship (to)
become one of the magazine's most prolific
article contributors."
"I finally had to have a stomach-ulcer
operation," Pete says, "and I don't know
how many art editors have Caesarian scars
up and down their bellies as a result of their
operation. .All I know is that I have. This
situation has been different under Ben
Hibbs as Editor-in-Chief, and Bob Fuoss as
Managing Editor. The present art editor is
art editor in fact as well as in title."
Everyone of his associates calls Pete a
"good reporter," and it is as such that Pete
would like best to be known. He has no
desire to write the Great American No\el,
or e\en a play. "I started as a fiction ^vriter,"
he says, "but the trouble was I had no plot
sense. I was fairly good at mood and dialogue,
but my plots were mostly incidents
blown up into stories. The editorial \ote
was too often, 'WeW done, but no story.' As