Grit (newspaper)
[2]While introducing such innovations as national newsboy delivery and direct mail, Lamade expanded his content to combine news, human interest articles, comic strips (sometimes filling ten pages), puzzles and serials in fiction supplements ("Grit Story Section").
[4] Another son, Howard J. Lamade, was vice president, and also served as a top executive with Little League Baseball, helping to build it into a national institution.
Approximately 30,000 children collected dimes from more than 700,000 American small town homes during the 1950s when the publication still carried the subtitle, "America's Greatest Family Newspaper."
[7] The Women's Section included fashion features and recipes, along with stories on house plants, new gadgets and how to hold a tea party.
The Family Section featured jokes, puzzles and the "Odd, Strange and Curious" page with stories on such subjects as a two-headed turtle and the world's largest collection of cigarette lighters.
[7] The Comic Section for January 1, 1950, carried the following Sunday comic strips in black-and-white: Chic Young's Blondie, Young's Colonel Potterby and the Duchess, Dixie Dugan by J. P. McEvoy and John H. Striebel, Walt Disney's Donald Duck, Flash Gordon by Mac Raboy and Don G. Moore, Carl Anderson's Henry, Ham Fisher's Joe Palooka, Jungle Jim by Paul Norris and Moore, Fran Striker's The Lone Ranger, Mandrake the Magician by Lee Falk and Phil Davis, J. R. Williams' Out Our Way, Hal Foster's Prince Valiant and Ed Reed's three-panel The Three Bares, extracted from Reed's Off the Record gag panel feature.
[7] Charlie Walker, writing in the February 16, 2000, edition of The News (Kingstree, South Carolina), described a 1956 issue: Grit was a pioneer in the introduction of offset printing.
It was one of the first newspapers in the US to run color photographs, with the first full-color picture (of the American flag) appearing on the front page in June 1963.
In 1983, Grit was purchased by Stauffer Communications, Inc. of Topeka, Kansas, which already owned Capper's Weekly, a national tabloid also marketed to rural areas and small towns, albeit mostly in the Great Plains and Midwestern states.
[10] At that time, Roberta Peterson was editor-in-chief of Grit and also of Best Recipes, a bimonthly glossy magazine that grew to be a Top 10 paid circulation national food title.
Grit, which had until this time been biweekly, was then edited by Kathryn Compton as a monthly with the subtitle "Stories of American Life & Tradition."
Other Ogden Publications include American Life & Traditions, Farm Collector, Mother Earth News and Utne Reader.
Beginning with the September 2006 issue, Grit converted to an all-glossy, perfect bound magazine format and a bi-monthly schedule.
The revamped editorial policy encompasses more of a contemporary rural emphasis on content, rather than the nostalgic themes of the previous decade.
