Here: Bill Jayme's Great cool day in November letter
please find it below.
Am looking for his Utne/Chutney letter, or indeed any of his financial letters, if anyone would be kind enough to share.
Enjoy
Fergal
Dear Reader,
It was a cool Friday in November.
Plymouth offered their newest model for $510 -- in an ad that also reminded you that you could tune in on Major Bowes' Original Amateur Hour any Thursday from 9 to 10.
Loyalists and Rebels were fighting in the outskirts of Madrid -- while many U.S. citizens were preparing to celebrate two Thanksgivings. Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne were at the Shubert, ambling through "Idiot's Delight" -- and a few doors down the street, a pillow-padded Helen Hayes was appearing as "Victoria Regina."
The WPA was dropping 3000 "non-essential" workers -- and the Post Office began assigning the first social security numbers to 26 million applicants. The football season was almost over, with Pittsburgh, Fordham and Dartmouth named the leading teams in the East -- while a Princeton sophomore reported that he had bid and made a redoubled grand slam with 13 spades.
And some 200,000 Americans (including you, perhaps?) were eagerly opening the first issue of a new magazine -- a magazine of pictures, datelined November 23, 1936.
Its publishers had promised to produce a magazine that would help Americans
"to see life...to see the world...to eyewitness great events...to watch the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud...to see strange things -- machines, armies, multitudes, shadows in the jungle and on the moon..."
* * *
In the fifteen years since then, the world LIFE promised to picture each week has moved ahead, and sometimes back...Roosevelt, Gandhi, Vandenberg, Mackenzie King, Forrestal, Stimson, Pius XI, Wendell Wilkie -- all are gone. But the years have brought us new names of headline stature: Truman, Nehru, Taft, Atlee, Hoffman, Bradley, De Gaulle, Charles Wilson.
Broadway has lost Al Jolson, John Barrymore, Helen Morgan, Laurette Taylor -- but it has gained Carol Channing, Marlon Brando, Mary Martin, Celeste Holm. Hollywood has lost Leslie Howard, Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Jean Harlow, W.C. Fields, Carole Lombard -- but it too has gained: Anne Baxter, Danny Kaye, Montgomery Clift, Jennifer Jones. We pay silent tribute to Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig - and we cheer for Joe DiMaggio and Jackie Robinson.
We have survived such astonishing phenomena as Wallis Warfield Simpson, goldfish swallowing, flying saucers, Orson Welles' invasion from Mars, C-rations, ankle-length hemlines and waist-length necklines, the Big Apple, bebop, "Gone With the wind," Pyramid Clubs, the Kinsey report, Dagmar.
And we have come through a real disaster: A World War that sucked up over a million lives, and a dirty game of see-saw in a far-away land called Korea.We have watched men split the atom and unite the nations of the world into a vast assembly. We have got rid of a Mussolini and a Hitler -- but they have willed us a Mao and a Stalin.
* * *
And what of LIFE -- the magazine that promised to present this stirring cavalcade of people and events in pictures all could "see and take pleasure in seeing...see and be amazed...see and be instructed?"
Its editors had hoped that by the end of LIFE's first year its circulation might reach 300,000, but within six months some 10,000,000 people were reading every issue, and LIFE, in its struggle to meet the demand, lost $2,500,000.
Today, LIFE is bought each week by more than 5,200,000 men and women -- read each week by some 24,000,000. And today we are inviting you to join them as a regular LIFE reader at a very special introductory rate -- to share with our editors LIFE's exciting, surprising 15th Anniversary of publishing.
* * *
What will you see in the issues of LIFE your subscription will bring you?
Decks crowded with thousands of returning servicemen, ad peace comes to Korea from the Yalu to the China Sea? The pomp and pageantry of princess Margaret's wedding in time-hallowed Westminster Abbey? The famous Eisenhower grin -- as Ike accepts the presidential nomination in Chicago?
Will you see the desserts of the west turn into flowering gardens as scientists perfect new ways of rain-making? ...three dimensional features that will lure us back to the movies, away from our TV screens...fashions that will give American women the look of Greek goddesses, or Quaker misses, or harem favourites?
What dramatic figures -- what heroic rescues at sea -- what strange lands, customs and costumes -- what newly unearthed art treasures -- what miracles of laboratory and workshop will the coming weeks and months bring to LIFE's pages, and so into your life?
Nobody knows the answers to these questions now -- but you can be sure of this: the issues of LIFE ahead will bring you a living record of an era which promises to be as unforgettable as any the world has ever known.
And I think you can picture for yourself how interesting, dramatic and valuable LIFE is sure to be to you and to every member of your family in the days ahead.
And so -- to help celebrate LIFE's 15th Anniversary in the most tangible way we know it -- e would like to make it unmistakably worth your while to have your own copy of LIFE every week instead of every now and then -- by offering you the special introductory subscription that brings you
39 weeks of LIFE for only $3.99!
This is almost four fifths of a year of LIFE at a price so low it brings LIFE to your door each week for little more than 10 cents -- just about half the single copy price.
No need to send any money with your order -- we'll be glad to bill you later.
But we hope you will want to be wit us right from the start of LIFE's 15th Anniversary year. So please sign the enclosed card and airmail it back to us at our expense today.
Cordially,
F.D. Pratt
Circulation Director
Andrew Gould