The Open Road for Boys
Encyclopedia
Clayton Holt Ernst was editor-in-chief of the Open Road. It was published by The Torbell Company, 248 Boylston St. in Boston, Massachusetts. The founding officers were Ormond E. Loomis, President, Clayton H. Ernst, Vice-President, and Wm. C. Blackett, Treasurer. They derived the company name from the initials of the magazine and their own last names: T[he]O[pen]R[oad]B[lackett]E[rnst]L[oomis]L[td].
By 1940, the circulation had climbed to 301,000. Beginning in 1944, the art director was Jack Murray (1889-1965), who was also the art director of Outdoors, Child Life and Salt Water Sportsman
Salt Water Sportsman
Salt Water Sportsman is a magazine about recreational marine fishing in the United States and throughout the world. Originally published in Boston, Massachusetts in 1939, Salt Water Sportsman expanded from its roots covering New England waters to address saltwater fishing issues throughout the...
.
Contributors
Contributors included Ellis Parker ButlerEllis Parker Butler
Ellis Parker Butler was an American author.Butler was born in Muscatine, Iowa. He was the author of more than 30 books and more than 2,000 stories and essays and is most famous for his short story "Pigs is Pigs", in which a bureaucratic stationmaster insists on levying the livestock rate for a...
, Jonathan Eldridge, Edward C. Janes, Kenneth Payson Kempton and Charles G. Muller, Alpheus Hyatt Verrill
Alpheus Hyatt Verrill
Alpheus Hyatt Verrill, known as Hyatt Verrill, was an American archaeologist, explorer, inventor, illustrator and author. He was the son of Addison Emery Verrill , the first professor of zoology at Yale University.Hyatt Verrill wrote on a wide variety of topics, including natural history, travel,...
and Kerry Wood. Some authors, such as Albert Capwell Wyckoff, wrote for both Boys' Life
Boys' Life
Boys' Life is the monthly magazine of the Boy Scouts of America . Its targeted readership is young American males between the ages of 6 and 18.Boys' Life is published in two demographic editions...
and The Open Road for Boys. In addition to adventure fiction, there were many articles and ads about the construction of model airplanes. The appeal of Open Road for Boys and the magazine's advertising, specifically an ad for the Red Ryder
Red Ryder
Red Ryder was a popular long-running Western comic strip created by Stephen Slesinger and artist Fred Harman. Beginning Sunday, November 6, 1938, Red Ryder was syndicated by Newspaper Enterprise Association, expanding over the following decade to 750 newspapers, translations into ten languages and...
air rifle, was captured by Jean Shepherd
Jean Shepherd
Jean Parker Shepherd was an American raconteur, radio and TV personality, writer and actor who was often referred to by the nickname Shep....
in his short story, "Duel in the Snow, or Red Ryder Nails the Cleveland Street Kid." This story was collected in In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash
In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash
In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash is a book of short stories by Jean Shepherd .It was first published by Doubleday in New York in October 1966....
, source of the film classic A Christmas Story
A Christmas Story
A Christmas Story is a 1983 American Christmas comedy film based on the short stories and semi-fictional anecdotes of author and raconteur Jean Shepherd, including material from his books In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, and Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories. It was directed by Bob Clark...
(1983):
- I remember clearly, itchingly, nervously, maddeningly the first time I laid eyes on it, pictured in a three-color, smeared illustration in a full-page back cover ad in Open Road For Boys, a publication which at the time had an iron grip on my aesthetic sensibilities, and the dime that I had to scratch up every month to stay with it. It was actually an early Playboy. It sold dreams, fantasies, incredible adventures, and a way of life. Its center foldouts consisted of gigantic Kodiak bears charging out of the page at the reader, to be gunned down in single hand-to-hand combat by the eleven-year-old Killers armed only with hunting knife and fantastic bravery. Its Christmas issue weighed over seven pounds, its pages crammed with the effluvia of the Good Life of male Juvenalia, until the senses reeled and Avariciousness, the growing desire to own Everything, was almost unbearable. Today there must be millions of ex-subscribers who still can't pass Abercrombie & FitchAbercrombie & FitchAbercrombie & Fitch is an American retailer that focuses on casual wear for consumers aged 18 to 22. It has over 300 locations in the United States, and is expanding internationally....
without a faint, keening note of desire and the unrequited urge to glom on to all of it. Just to have it, to feel it.
Cartoon contest
A popular Open Road feature was a cartoon contest which showed a drawing of a problem or situation, inviting the magazine's readers to do a follow-up cartoon showing the resolution of the problem. Well known cartoonists, such as Paul Coker, George Crenshaw, Dan HeilmanDan Heilman
Dan Heilman was the first artist of the Judge Parker comic strip. He was born in 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio.Having served in World War II, Heilman became an assistant to artist Ken Ernst on the Mary Worth comic strip, and to Roy Crane on Buz Sawyer. In 1949 he was the artist for a comic strip called...
, Eldon Pletcher, Mort Walker
Mort Walker
Addison Morton Walker , popularly known as Mort Walker, is an American comic artist best known for creating the newspaper comic strips Beetle Bailey in 1950 and Hi and Lois in 1954. He has signed Addison to some of his strips.Born in El Dorado, Kansas, he grew up in Kansas City, Missouri...
, Bill Yates
Bill Yates
Floyd Buford Yates , better known as Bill Yates, was a cartoonist who drew gag cartoons and comic strips before assuming the position of comic strip editor for King Features Syndicate in 1978.Yates learned to cartoon by taking the W. L...
and Bob Zschiesche, saw their first printed cartoons in the Open Road competitions, which also had an influence on illustrators and fine artists, as the painter Wayne Thiebaud
Wayne Thiebaud
Wayne Thiebaud is an American painter whose most famous works are of cakes, pastries, boots, toilets, toys and lipsticks. He is associated with the Pop art movement because of his interest in objects of mass culture, although his works, executed during the fifties and sixties, slightly predate...
noted in an interview with Susan Larsen:
- I got very interested in cartooning... mostly just the American comics in the newspapers. For a long time, I remember I cut out strips and kept them around. Then I would copy them and so on and got more and more interested. By the time I was maybe 16, I guess, 15, I started sending in cartoons to magazines. They had these contests in a magazine called Open Road for Boys. They would say: "Draw a cartoon in which you would say how this problem is solved." So I did that and I remember having a couple of things published, and I was very excited and so on... I think I got a dollar, a dollar prize.
Cover artists included Jacob Bates Abbott, George Avison, Clarence Doore, William D. Eaton and Charles Hargens
Charles Hargens
Charles Hargens painted covers for The Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, Country Gentleman, Farm Journal, Boy's Life, The Open Road for Boys and 300 books, including the Zane Grey Western novels of the 1930s and 1940s. His work is similar to that of Frederic Remington...
.
In 1927, the magazine began a club for boys called Open Road Pioneers. The club's official pin, in gold and dark blue, displayed the left profile of a Davy Crockett
Davy Crockett
David "Davy" Crockett was a celebrated 19th century American folk hero, frontiersman, soldier and politician. He is commonly referred to in popular culture by the epithet "King of the Wild Frontier". He represented Tennessee in the U.S...
-type adventurer wearing a coonskin cap and carrying a rifle.