Gas Engine Magazine: Preserving America's Antique Stationary Engines
Gas Engine Magazine is a specialist magazine devoted to antique stationary gasoline engines, the single-cylinder workhorses that powered American farms, workshops, pumps and small industry before rural electrification. Published by Ogden Publications in Topeka, Kansas, and found online at gasenginemagazine.com, it carries restoration projects, engine histories, show reports and the lore of the collectors who rescue, rebuild and run these century-old machines.
The magazine's origins go back to 1966, when the editors of the steam hobby's Iron-Men Album recognised that gasoline engines needed a publication of their own. Six decades later, Gas Engine Magazine, often shortened to GEM by its readers, remains the journal of record for a hobby built around flywheel engines: their makers, their mechanisms, their restoration and the community of shows where they still run, belted to pumps, saws and corn shellers, for crowds who come to watch.
Overview
Gas Engine Magazine covers the world of antique internal combustion engines, principally the stationary gasoline and kerosene engines built from the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth. Its publisher describes the subject as the history of the internal combustion engine, and its pages treat engines the way other magazines treat classic cars: marque histories, model identification, restoration sequences, collection profiles and event coverage, all aimed at owners and enthusiasts of specific, often obscure, manufacturers.
The magazine is the sister title of Farm Collector, Ogden's general antique farm equipment magazine, and the two share an archive and an audience. Where Farm Collector ranges across tractors, steam, implements and memorabilia, Gas Engine stays with its engines: the Stover, Hercules, Waterloo Boy, Cushman, Challenge and hundreds of other makes its readers hunt, haul home and return to running order. That narrowness is its strength, because its subject demands technical detail that only a dedicated title will print.
History and Founding
Gas Engine Magazine began in 1966 inside Stemgas Publishing, the Enola, Pennsylvania, company built around the Iron-Men Album, the magazine of the steam traction engine hobby. The recollection of Anna Mae Brubaker, who worked on the magazines for decades, preserves the founding plainly: the Iron-Men Album had one page for gas engines, Elmer Ritzman, the Album's publisher, saw the need for another publication, and that was the year they started Gas Engine. Anna Mae herself, home from hospital after encephalitis in 1966, kept up her column without missing an issue and went on to handle stories and the makeup of the magazines.
The Ritzman operation was a family enterprise. Elmer's wife Earlene ran the business after his death in 1971, relying on Anna Mae for articles and advertisements, with an office staff by then handling subscriptions and the books and jewellery the company also sold. In 1973 Earlene Ritzman sold the business to Gerald S. Lestz, who asked Anna Mae to stay on; she continued to handle articles, pictures, ads and correspondence, and to compile the annual Stemgas steam and gas show directory. The magazines eventually passed to Ogden Publications, which publishes Gas Engine from Topeka alongside Farm Collector today.
Publisher and Ownership
Ogden Publications, Inc., of Topeka, Kansas, is the magazine's current publisher. Ogden specialises in magazines and books for passionate enthusiast communities, with brands including Mother Earth News, Grit, Capper's Farmer, Motorcycle Classics and Farm Collector. Its presentation of Gas Engine is succinct, the history of the internal combustion engine, and it sells the magazine in tandem with restoration books and with the combined Farm Collector and Gas Engine archive, recognising how completely the two readerships overlap.
The journey from Enola to Topeka mirrors the hobby's own history. Stemgas was a small enthusiast publisher run from show stands at reunions such as Rough and Tumble at Kinzers, Pennsylvania, where Elmer Ritzman was a charter member and where staff sold the Iron-Men Album, Gas Engine Magazine and historic reprint books from a table. Under Ogden, the magazine gained professional production and a substantial website, while retaining the reader-supplied stories and show culture of its Stemgas decades.
Editorial Content and Sections
Restoration is the magazine's beating heart. Features follow engines from rescue to runner: a rusty hulk identified, stripped, machined and rebuilt component by component, with the kind of practical detail, on bearings, cylinder heads, ignition, rust removal and thread repair, that readers use in their own shops. Collection profiles present owners and their fleets, such as the Minnesota collector of upright engines, or the Michigan collector who once arranged around a hundred hog oilers in his yard for a single family photograph, a story told with the humour typical of the magazine's community writing.
History is the second pillar. The magazine has published long-running reference work on American gasoline engines since 1872, profiles of manufacturers such as the Hercules Engine companies of Canton, Ohio, and studies of individual models, their bore and stroke, serial numbers, cooling and ignition systems and production dates. Show reports, event listings and readers' queries about unknown engines complete the mix, making each issue part workshop manual, part museum catalogue and part club newsletter for a national community.
The Community: Shows, Reunions and the Golden Roll
Gas Engine Magazine exists in close partnership with the show circuit. From its Stemgas years, when its publishers sold subscriptions from stands at reunions, the magazine has listed, reported and celebrated the steam and gas shows where engines are exhibited running. Its annual show directory tradition, compiled in the Stemgas era by Anna Mae Brubaker as part of her work on the magazines, helped coordinate a calendar of hundreds of local events, and show reports remain a staple, recording line-ups of engines at grounds from Montpelier, Ohio, to Hastings, Michigan.
The community function extended to remembrance. The magazines' Golden Roll recorded the deaths of engine men and women, with appreciations of their engines, clubs and threshing careers, submitted by families and fellow exhibitors. Such pages explain why readers describe the old magazine as a friendly hobby publication whose correspondents felt like personal friends; Anna Mae said the people who wrote to her columns were like friends she recognised instantly when they finally met at a show. That social fabric is the magazine's real subject, with engines as its occasion.
Audience and Circulation
Readers are collectors and restorers of antique engines: people who own anything from a single Maytag or hit-and-miss engine to sheds full of rare uprights and oil engines, who exhibit at shows, trade parts, and argue happily over magneto types and serial number ranges. Many came to engines through farming backgrounds, remembering the pump engines and saw rigs of their childhoods; others arrived from antique tractor pulling and general old-iron collecting, finding engines a more sociable, sit-back-and-enjoy branch of the hobby, as one long-time collector put it.
It is a participatory audience in the classic hobby-magazine mould. Much of the magazine has always been reader-supplied: rescue stories, collection tours, identification help and show photographs. Readers have also been candid critics; when the magazine's format and frequency changed in later years, some subscribers wrote publicly that they missed the thicker issues, the pages of buy-and-sell advertisements and the funny retrieval stories of earlier decades. That frankness is itself evidence of the bond: GEM's readers regard the magazine as theirs.
Print and Digital Editions
Gas Engine Magazine began as a print magazine in the bimonthly rhythm of the Album family, sold by subscription and at show stands, and print remains its home: issues are collected, traded and resold by enthusiasts, with vintage numbers from the 1970s still circulating in the hobby's marketplace. Under Ogden the magazine is published in Topeka in a modern format with colour photography that older readers have noticed and welcomed, even while remarking that issues are thinner than in the advertising-rich 1980s.
Digitally, gasenginemagazine.com organises decades of material by topic, from engine histories and manufacturer series to farm show reports and community stories, and Ogden markets a combined Farm Collector and Gas Engine archive drawn from the magazines' back files. Online forums and communities, notably the SmokStak antique engine community, now handle much of the instant identification and trading that once filled the magazine's advertisement pages, while the magazine itself concentrates on the considered restoration and history features that forums do poorly.
Notable People and Contributors
The founding generation defines the magazine's story. Elmer Ritzman, publisher of the Iron-Men Album, recognised the gasoline engine hobby's need and launched the title in 1966. His wife Earlene Ritzman carried the enterprise after his death in 1971 and sold it in 1973. Anna Mae Brubaker, whose byline and columns ran for decades, selected and handled the articles, pictures and advertisements, compiled the show directory and became the magazine's institutional memory; her published reminiscences are now a primary source for its early history.
Contributors across the years include the engine historians and restorers whose serialised reference work built the hobby's knowledge base, among them the compilers of the American Gasoline Engines Since 1872 series hosted on the magazine's site, and freelance writers such as Bill Vossler, whose engine collection profiles appeared across the Ogden heritage titles. In the modern era, Ogden's heritage editorial team, shared with Farm Collector, produces the magazine, commissioning restoration narratives and manufacturer histories from specialist writers inside the collecting community.
Awards and Recognition
Gas Engine Magazine's recognition is the recognition of a founding institution. It is credited, in the recollections of its own staff, with creating a dedicated press for the gasoline engine hobby at the moment that hobby separated from the steam world, and its back run is treated as an archive of record: Ogden's combined archive product draws on its issues, and libraries of its early numbers document shows, engines and people recorded nowhere else.
Within the hobby, the magazine's name functions as a credential. Engines are advertised for sale with their Gas Engine Magazine feature appearances noted, collectors measure their standing by publication of their restorations, and the title's survival through changes of owner, format and frequency is itself regularly remarked upon by its community. For a title launched as one page's worth of demand inside another magazine, becoming the permanent journal of an entire collecting field is the substantial honour.
Recent Developments
In recent years the magazine has continued under Ogden with its established mixture: Hercules and other manufacturer histories, restoration projects, show and community coverage, and reference content republished and expanded online. The challenges its readers discuss, thinner print issues as advertising moves online, an ageing collector base and competition from instant digital communities, are those of every heritage hobby title, and the magazine's response has been to lean on what it does uniquely well: verified histories, complete restoration accounts and the curated record of the show world.
Sixty years after Elmer Ritzman gave gasoline engines their own magazine, Gas Engine Magazine remains the place where the stationary engine hobby writes its history. From Topeka, in print and at gasenginemagazine.com, it continues to serve the collectors who keep the flywheels turning, and to preserve, engine by engine, the story of the machines that powered rural America before the power lines arrived.
