About The Open Road for Boys

The Open Road for Boys

The Open Road for Boys was an American boys' magazine encouraging the outdoor life, published in Boston, Massachusetts, from November 1919 until the 1950s. It began simply as The Open Road, expanded its title to The Open Road for Boys in October 1925, and kept that best-known name for a quarter of a century. A monthly for its first twenty years, it later published ten issues a year. In April 1950 the title changed to Open Road: The Young People's Magazine, and in its final year, with the July 1953 issue, to American Boy and Open Road; the magazine folded in 1954. At its height it reached several hundred thousand boy readers with adventure fiction, outdoor instruction, hobby guidance and a famous cartooning contest.

The Torbell Company and the Founders

The magazine was originally published by the Torbell Company at 248 Boylston Street in Boston, Massachusetts. Its founding officers were Ormond E. Loomis, president; Clayton H. Ernst, vice-president; and Wm. C. Blackett, treasurer, and they derived the company name from the initials of the magazine and their own last names: The Open Road, Blackett, Ernst and Loomis, Ltd. The three founders were friends and recent graduates of Harvard University. Ernst, who became editor-in-chief of The Open Road, appears to have been the only one of the three with publishing experience, having worked for the esteemed periodical Youth's Companion. What the men shared was an enthusiasm for outdoor recreation, Scouting and adventure, which motivated the magazine's editorial direction from its first issue in November 1919. Nathan Lincoln, another Harvard alumnus, joined the magazine's staff following Blackett's death in 1925.

An Editorial Mission Without Preaching

Nathan Lincoln later summarized the magazine's purpose as guiding boys, without preaching, in matters such as sports, physical fitness, vocational opportunities and social behavior — inspiring them, almost without their knowing it, to constructive achievement. In roughly fifty monthly, eclectic pages, Open Road shared fictional and real-life adventure stories, encouraged developing competence in activities such as camping and marksmanship, supported international penpals and cultural awareness, and provided guidance on hobbies. The typical format was about 8⅜ by 11½ inches with 30 to 60 pages. That blend — entertainment carrying instruction inside it — defined the magazine's place in the small, burgeoning periodicals market for younger readers into which it entered after the First World War, competing for the same boy readers as the Boy Scouts' Boys' Life; some authors, such as Albert Capwell Wyckoff, wrote for both magazines.

Fiction, Adventure and Model Airplanes

The magazine featured a large amount of fiction alongside its non-fiction. Its tales presented adventurous boys and men traveling to faraway places, battling creatures of the wild or America's enemies, and its pages carried many articles and advertisements about the construction of model airplanes, a signature hobby of the era's boy readership. Contributors included Ellis Parker Butler, Jonathan Eldridge, Edward C. Janes, Kenneth Payson Kempton, Charles G. Muller, Alpheus Hyatt Verrill and Kerry Wood. Butler's contributions documented in bibliographies include the story "Down the Delaware" in July 1933 and "The Bowlegged Horse" in December 1936. Cover artists included Jacob Bates Abbott, George Avison, Clarence Doore, William D. Eaton and Charles Hargens, whose work gave the magazine the vigorous outdoor imagery its title promised.

Circulation Growth

The magazine's circulation reached about 150,000 by 1930, before peaking at nearly 400,000 later in the 1930s, according to figures cited in scholarship on the magazine. By 1940, its circulation is separately recorded as having climbed to 301,000. Even allowing for differences between sources and years, the trajectory is clear: a Boston boys' monthly founded in 1919 had become, by the late 1930s, one of the largest-circulation magazines for boys in the United States, sold at a ten-cent cover price. Its readers were loyal enough that a single borrowed or newsstand copy could circulate through a family — surviving research on its cartoon contest records siblings in a financially precarious Wisconsin household entering competitions through copies they cannot have subscribed to, at a price a single issue made affordable.

The Cartooning Contests

A popular Open Road feature was its cartoon contest. Beginning with the March 1926 issue and continuing near-monthly until the magazine's demise in the 1950s, the contest showed a drawing of a problem or situation — typically a short poem and a single-panel cartoon placing a character in a fantastically improbable situation — and invited readers to draw the follow-up cartoon showing the resolution. After the first few contests, entrants submitted their solutions by postal mail in black ink on paper measuring four by five inches. For each contest the magazine reproduced the first-, second- and third-place winners, paying them five, three and two dollars respectively, along with two Special Mention and eight Honorable Mention entries, and printed the names and home cities of dozens of additional honorable mentions. Advertising manager Lev Gleason, who later became a comics publisher, likely instigated the contest while employed at Open Road.

A Training Ground for Cartoonists

The contests gave many future professionals their first printed cartoons. Well-known cartoonists such as Paul Coker, George Crenshaw, Dan Heilman, Eldon Pletcher, Mort Walker, Bill Yates and Bob Zschiesche saw their first printed cartoons in the Open Road competitions. Animator Bill Peet and comic-book artist Reed Crandall were among the other notable participants identified by research into the contests, and a scholarly prosopography has examined a sample of nearly 1,000 contest participants from the early 1930s to trace who they were and what they became. The painter Wayne Thiebaud recalled in a Smithsonian interview that around age fifteen or sixteen he sent cartoons to the contests in Open Road for Boys, had a couple of things published, and received a dollar prize — an early encouragement he remembered with excitement decades later. Few magazine features of the period can be traced so directly into the careers of later American cartoonists and artists.

The Open Road Pioneers

In 1927, the magazine began a club for boys called the Open Road Pioneers. The club's official pin, in gold and dark blue, displayed the left profile of a Davy Crockett-type adventurer wearing a coonskin cap and carrying a rifle. Other accounts of the magazine date the start of its Pioneers' Club to 1928, but the club itself is consistently remembered as one of the magazine's signature reader institutions of the late 1920s, extending the relationship between magazine and reader beyond the printed page in the same spirit as its penpal support and its contests. Together, the club, the contests and the correspondence features made Open Road less a product boys merely bought than a small national community they belonged to.

Jean Shepherd and the Red Ryder Advertisement

The appeal of Open Road for Boys — and of its advertising — was captured most famously by Jean Shepherd in his short story "Duel in the Snow, or Red Ryder Nails the Cleveland Street Kid," collected in In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, the source of the film A Christmas Story (1983). In Shepherd's telling, the narrator first encounters the Red Ryder air rifle in a full-page back-cover advertisement in Open Road for Boys, a publication he describes as holding an iron grip on his sensibilities and on the dime he scraped up each month to keep receiving it. Shepherd portrayed the magazine as a seller of dreams, fantasies and adventures, with foldouts of charging Kodiak bears and Christmas issues crammed with the goods of boyhood desire. The story fixed the magazine permanently in American popular memory as the place where a generation of boys first saw the objects they longed for.

Later Years: Ten Issues a Year and New Titles

The magazine was a monthly for its first twenty years and then switched to a schedule of ten issues a year; from 1941 it omitted January and August, months of low readership. Beginning in 1944, its art director was Jack Murray (1889–1965), who was also art director of Outdoors, Child Life and Salt Water Sportsman. The title changes of the final years chart a magazine searching for a postwar audience: The Open Road for Boys became Open Road: The Young People's Magazine in April 1950, broadening its stated readership beyond boys, and then American Boy and Open Road with the July 1953 issue, merging its identity with that of another long-running boys' title. The combined title did not last long, and the magazine folded some time in 1954.

Legacy

The Open Road for Boys is remembered on three levels. For its original readers, it was the outdoor and adventure monthly founded in Boston in 1919 by three Harvard friends, whose fifty pages mixed fiction, camping and marksmanship, model airplanes and hobby guidance with a deliberate refusal to preach. For historians of comics and cartooning, its contests — running from 1926 into the 1950s — form a documented record of youth participatory culture, launching or encouraging Mort Walker, George Crenshaw, Bill Peet, Reed Crandall, Wayne Thiebaud and dozens of other artists whose names and home towns the magazine printed each month. And for the wider culture, Jean Shepherd's Red Ryder story preserved the magazine's back-cover advertisement as one of the most famous images of American boyhood in the twentieth century — a fitting afterlife for a magazine that had always sold its readers, in Lincoln's phrase, constructive achievement disguised as adventure.