Year-and-a-half ago the famed old Police Gazette, pink-covered journal of sports news and chorus girls' pictures, fell victim to the Depression. In its 88 years it had passed through a variety of incarnations, beginning as "a most interesting record of horrid murders, outrageous robberies, bold forgeries, astounding burglaries, hideous rapes, vulgar seductions. . . ." It "crusaded against vice" with marvelous and explicit gusto. Under the administration of the late Richard Kyle Fox, who bought the Gazette in 1876, it gained fame as an arbiter and promoter of sporting events, and was such a fixture in barber shops that it was called "The Barber's Bible." It continued to make a feature of pictures of big-bosomed, broad-hipped females, but such fare lacked spice for post-War readers. A year ago the defunct Gazette was auctioned for $545 to a lawyer who refused to reveal his client.
Last week the new owner and the future of the Police Gazette were revealed. The owner is Merwil Publishing Co. consisting of Irving & Harry Donenfeld and Mrs. Merle Williams Hersey. Merwil Publishing Co. issues five of the smuttiest magazines on the newsstands—Snappy, Spicy, Gay Parisienne, La Paree, Pep. They consist of sleazy stories, drawings and "art study" photographs of undressed females. Mrs. Hersey edits them.
Editrix Hersey is the divorced wife of one Harold Hersey who formerly edited magazines for Bernarr Macfadden. She is gentle-mannered, motherly, with grey bobbed hair, a member of the D. A. R. and Order of the Eastern Star. Daughter of a Methodist minister (there are 25 Methodist ministers, mostly missionaries, in her family), she was graduated from Willamette, a Methodist university in Oregon. At various times she worked in Washington as secretary to onetime Congressman George E. Foss of Illinois; in the Bureau of Education; in the horticultural board of the Department of Agriculture; as a researcher in the State Department. Following a few sporadic efforts at magazine writing and editing she joined the Donenfelds in 1929. Her 18-year-old daughter, she says, is an avid reader of La Paree, et al. "It is the most interesting form of journalism," believes Editrix Hersey. "It gets you so close to people. They write in and tell us we help them escape inhibitions."
Editrix Hersey announces revival of the Police Gazette in September as a fortnightly. It will be printed in rotogravure with the old masthead. There will be a comic strip narrating the life of a chorus girl named "Flossie Flip" and a Broadway colyum. Besides sport news, it will contain, in Editrix Hersey's carefully chosen words: "Lots of sex, underworld stuff with a sex angle, and plenty of pictures of semi-nude nightclub girls."
Anti-Long Merger
A marvelous thing is the crawfish. He revels in mud and in slime. He wallows in gutters, this raw fish, And has a most wonderful time. . . .