If you didn't read the Style cover May 22, today's column won't make a lot of sense, but it will make some.
It will make enough sense that by the time we're finished here, you'll understand how "George Martin," while in most respects a perfectly blameless name, is too popular. In this context.
In this context, too many historical people who left footsteps in the sand have been named George Martin.
Readers who did pick up Style's May 22 story know that I'm complaining about the proliferation of George Martins because, it appears, one of those ol' guys caused the Arkansas Gazette to publish a most unusual page of advertising, The Page of Presidents, in 1912 and again in 1917.
It was a full-page spelling contest with 27 ad sponsors. It conveyed tidbits about 27 U.S. presidents, from George Washington through Woodrow Wilson. Readers were challenged to spot an intentionally misspelled word in each ad. Adding a layer of confusion, other words were unintentionally misspelled. But readers who answered some questions, listed the bad words and then delivered their findings to all 27 advertisers as well as to the Gazette had a chance at $25 in gold.
Because finding typos is still fun, for the next several weeks Style will publish the 1917 page's blurbs a few at a time, re-created for your amusement by Arkansas Democrat-Gazette head artist Kirk Montgomery.
It was all very special, but not unique to Little Rock.
Nearly the same page, using similar prose and the very same art, appeared here and there, now and then, in other newspapers in other states from 1909 to 1921. The earliest instance I've found was in 1909 in North Carolina's Wilmington Morning Star. Its page bore this title: "Geo. Martin's Page of Presidents" and follow-up stories said a George Martin had conducted the contest.
But which one?
One George Martin in 1882 was superintendent of the Park Congregational Sunday School in New York but obliged to resign on account of ill health. Another, who in 1884 was the proprietor of the Vanderbilt Hotel at Vanderbilt Landing on Staten Island, was left by his wife.
Once upon a time in 1887, an elderly George Martin who lived in Brooklyn, N.Y., took a case containing two small violins of peculiar make to Edward Tubbs, a maker and repairer of musical instruments at 394 Bowery St., and offered them for sale. They were stolen goods.
In July 1888, a George Martin who had been a prominent Republican politician of southern Pennsylvania announced that he would support Grover Cleveland and somebody else in a coming election.
Once you get started on George Martins, you can't stop.
In October 1889, about 6:30 o'clock in the morning, a milkman discovered the dead body of a George Martin Jr., lying upon the ground just inside the entrance to the Williams-Street Cemetery at the corner of ... forget it. Dead in 1889 is not selling ads in 1909.
Up at the old-fashioned New York office building at 208 W. Washington Square one day in 1890, folks were retelling the story of how George Martin, the errand boy of Judge Biddle, had been overpowered by desperate footpads and then chloroformed!
George Martin and Angus Morrison, belonging to the fishing schooner Oliver Wendell Holmes, arrived at North Sydney and reported that ... George Martin, 22, who said he had no home, was arrested because ... George Martin who claimed to be a newspaperman ... George Martin, the tenor soloist ... George Martin of the Boonton Bicycle Club who hosted a band of the wheelmen ... George Martin was a target for Michael O'Brien's bullets ... George Martin, religious enthusiast, arrested with gunpowder ... George Martin, whose 17-year-old daughter (pretty and quiet) ran off with her pastor ... George Martin the county judge ... George Martin the elevator operator ....
TOO MANY GEORGES
From a collection of letters by Robert Frost I learned that one very promising George Martin persuaded Frost to give him two poems for the national magazine Farm & Fireside, which Martin edited. From 1919 until 1929 -- when the magazine was transmogrified into Country Home -- his office was in New York.
This Martin was talented, firmly believed in advertising and wrote with flair. See "The Wit of Will Rogers" from the July 1919 The American Magazine at bit.ly/2r0yO9t.
He's described in Nine Decades in the Human Race, the funny autobiography by humorist Wheeler McMillen (see bit.ly/2qgnIOH). And I like this description of Martin from The Knapps Lived Here (Elm & McKinley, 2010) by Ken Spooner:
In 1929 Tom Beck decided that "Firesides are out of date ... everyone has radiators now" and that Farm & Fireside needed a major makeover into a much slicker publication to compete with their major competitor Curtis Publications, Country Gentleman.
George Martin whose personal depression was all ready preceding the stock market crash, phoned Beck from a speak easy where he was keeping company with W.C. Fields at four in the morning. Martin wanted to let Beck know where he could stick Country Home. Resignation accepted.
Unfortunately, Spooner tells me he has no other information on that George Martin. And although I found several of his essays and two photographs of him, and a hint that he might have been a Hoosier, I have not got his middle initial or a biography.
Anyway, there's a chance our George served in the U.S. Army, because after the Page of Presidents appeared again in Wilmington, N.C., in 1915, the Morning Star referred to him as "Col. George Martin."
From stories carried in several reports I found through Newspapers.com, I know that he wrote letters about his page to four presidents: Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, William Howard Taft and Warren G. Harding, and heard back from them. Harding liked the page so well he offered to run it in his newspaper in Marion, Ohio, for free.
Which suggests Martin was paying to place it where he did.
In my imagination, our Martin is a traveling entrepreneur of cross-promotion and possibly a hobbyist. I imagine him obtaining space in the newspapers to announce his contest and then personally knocking on doors to recruit businessmen sponsors for the page, space for which he would buy the way any business might buy a full-page ad.
As he, apparently, put it (in several of the newspapers he used):
The "Page of Presidents" is simply an incident in advertising ... a straw to show the direction of the wind -- an idea of merit, furnishing amusement, instruction and profit to the readers and indisputable evidence of the value of advertising to the businessmen participating.
The right kind of advertising in the right medium will always pay -- the "Page of Presidents" is a proposition that proves itself.
Next week: Another George Martin
ActiveStyle on 05/29/2017