The Press: Ringmaster

Harry Aloysius McGuire wore the first coonskin coat ever seen on the campus of Notre Dame University, edited the student Scholastic, was suspended for burlesquing the prefect of discipline, became class poet, class orator and was graduated in 1925 with the highest grades ever recorded at the University. On Commencement Day Notre Dame's president was heard to mutter that he was relieved to see the last of Harry McGuire.

After two years at Yale's School of Fine Arts, Harry McGuire was called home to Denver, made editor of Outdoor Life, potent sporting magazine which his father had founded in 1898. Editor McGuire took seriously his job of running a publication, increased circulation to 139,603, made $50,000 in good years. In line of duty he formed a Bear Protection Society, went deep-sea fishing in the Gulf of Mexico with the president of the University of Minnesota and, while intoxicated in Mexico, shot the sixth largest antelope ever bagged.

In 1931 the elder McGuire sold Outdoor Life, retired to California. Harry McGuire went to Europe, soon returned to edit Outdoor Life for its new owners at tiny Mt. Morris, Ill., 100 mi. west of Chicago. There he found time to contract and recover from a nervous breakdown, lay out a private polo field, break his nose in an automobile smash-up and become familiar with many of the nation's literary and social lights, who in turn came to regard kinetic, fun-loving Harry McGuire as something of a character himself.

In 1934 Outdoor Life was taken over by Popular Science. Editor McGuire was left with nothing to do. Alone and bored during the long winter evenings in his Mt. Morris farmhouse, he decided to relieve the tedium by publishing a magazine of his own, no sportsman's forum like hearty Outdoor Life but a sophisticated journal to which his friends could contribute. At first he toyed with the idea of bidding for moribund Vanity Fair, then decided to think out an entirely new editorial formula, present it in a brand-new publication.

Last week it was revealed that to picture and report the contemporary scene entirely from the viewpoint of satire was Editor McGuire's big idea. On newsstands went 41,000 copies of a glossy new 35¢ magazine named Ringmaster, The World in Caricature. Vol. I, No. 1 offered the writings of John V. A. Weaver, John R. Tunis, Stanley Walker, the drawings of Peggy Bacon, William Cropper, David Low, Mitchell Siporin.

No shirker, Ringmaster's ringmaster wrote his own opening article under the pseudonym of "Guy McHerring.'' An extraordinary piece of prose called Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Stieglitz and Splendour, it seemed to be intended as political fantasy.

Other features included an article on The New Yorker's Editor Harold Ross by The American Legion Monthly's Editor John T. Winterich, a We Rescue from Oblivion department spotlighting such has-beens as Clara Bow, William H. ("Alfalfa Bill") Murray, the Dolly Sisters. Throughout the book were scattered caricatures of such thoroughly-caricatured celebrities as Ernest Hemingway, William Randolph Hearst. Joe Louis. Impartial observers guessed that the winters in Mt. Morris, Ill. must indeed be tiresome.