SPENCE, J. Hartzell

SPENCE, GIOSCIO, GILLETTE

Posted By: Sharon R Becker (email)
Date: 11/11/2014 at 01:28:58

The Globe Gazette
Mason City, Cerro Gordo County, Iowa
Saturday, July 27, 1940, Page 16

THEY STARTED HERE
No. 19 in a Mason City Series of Success Stories

J. HARTZELL SPENCE, Heads U.P. Radio Activities

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
(EDITOR'S NOTE: When asked for material from which to write an article in this series of weekly features, J. Hartzell Spence's answer was the following autobiography. It obviously is so well written that no efforts at rewriting by a reporter would likely to result in an improvement. We therefore are taking the liberty of representing it as written by Mr. Spence.)

By J. HARTZELL SPENCE

The summer of 1914 when I was 8, father took a cottage at Clear Lake for the month of August. We were then living at Fort Dodge. We bounced through Clarion long enough for me to see the house in whichhad had been born in 1908 (Feb. 15) and detoured past Lake Mills so my sisters, Eileen, could see her birthplace. Then we swung down into Mason City, and father said: "Now it's only ten miles to the lake. This country is home."

* * *
For me, a preacher's son accustomed to internerant living and parsonages,a home was where the meals happened to be served. To be introduced to a home was a wonder indeed. Father's remark therefore stayed in my mind, even though we were often far away from Cerro Gordo county, and when finally, in 1929, father wrote to me, then a student at the University of Iowa: "We are moving back home, to North Iowa," I could understand what he meant.

Not, however, until the summer vacation, when I met the people of Mason City, did I understand what, in its fullness, home is.

* * *
Mr. Webster says that a home is "one's own dwelling place; the house in which one lives." But if you look in a very big dictionary you will see another definition. A home is "the abiding place of the affections." The house in which I live is a variegated place. One time it is an apartment house, another a hotel. It is still; for I have no permanent dwelling.

But the abiding place of my affections is Mason City. It is home.

* * *
Technically, Mason City is home in another sense. It was the town from which I made the transition from being fed to feeding myself. It was home when I got my first permanent jobs. it was the place where I started to "root hog or die."

I was playing in the Clear Lake band in the summer of 1930, my second season under Dan Gioscio, and I was fresh out of the University of Iowa [graduating with the Class of 1930] and feeling important; Phi Beta Kappa and A. F. I. keys on my vest; the kind of importance one feels only at sheepskin time and had best get over quickly.

* * *
I had feelers out and heard that what I really wanted might be available: A press association job. I had been working on newspapers since the age of 15 but I wanted the wider horizon of the press association which covers the world instead of one market area.

One of my feelers came home. United Press in Des Moines needed a man. I went to W. Earl Hall and told him that I wanted to make an impression on United Press before I went down there, not quite trusting my selling ability. Mr. Hall and the editors of three other Iowa newspapers for which Ihad worked all wrote United Press about me.

When I arrived for my interview after the bombardment of influential newspaper recommendations, the manager looked at me once, pointed to the coat rack, and went on with his work. I hung up my coat.

* * *
Except for a six month interval in 1932 when I was out with Dr. George H. Gallup, i have been with UP ever since. At Des Moines I worked three years, then the manager for Iowa was moved to another job.

The custom was to bring in an experienced man from a big bureau to be Iowa manager. Instead, when Gene Gillette left, I was given his job. In three years I had had my ears pinned back considerably and a job which when I was graduated from Iowa I would have accepted confidently I now felt incapble of filling. But 12 hours to 16 hours of work 7 days a week for 18 months did the trick and gave me some grey hairs in the process.

* * *
Meanwhile I had been tinkering with radio, then banned by agreement of the publishers. Radio news was taboo. United Press sold no news for radio consumption. But I had theories and began to work on them. I listened to radio programs. I wrote theorectical news broadcasts interpreting the news. Nobody saw them but I. That went on for more than a year, and then United Press began to be radio-minded. I was on the ground floor.

* * *
Within a few weeks our radio sales had reached Minneapolis. There a lad I had broken in at Des Moines was assigned to radio. Remembering my tinkering with this nebulous medium, he asked for help. I sat down and wrote him a style book for radio news writing, and sent a copy to the New York executives, hoping to impress them. I did.

That weekend, while visiting in Mason City (home again) New York telephoned, transferring me there immediately. I packed and shipped my belongins and drove to New York in three days. Here I have remained ever since, six years not.

* * *
Radio has grown up and those who were somewhat on the ground floor have been pulled up along with it. Radio gave me other ideas, so many that a department was organized and then a corporation, to handle them.

At present I have all the by-products. If you want to be technical, I am manager of United Radio Shows, Inc., manager of the Special Service Bureau of the United Press and editor of Predate, a weekly publication for the trade.

* * *
My job is to find uses for United Press news, new ways to adapt news, and new ways of adapting the world-wide organization of United Press to the demands of a very rapidly changing world.

At the moment I am up to my ears in several proposed television shows, am producing a transcribed show, and keeping irons hot in several by-product fields while studying frequency modulations and television at night.

My department emply a staff of 15. I no longer have anything to do with radio news itself; that enterprise now has a leased wire system of its own. I am still the experimenter, the by-product producer.

* * *
My hobby always has been writing things besides news. When I was in the sixth grade I wrote a novel, a vicious thing in writing now illigible in spots. In the seventh grade I wrote another; in the ninth grade another; in high school two more. Now I have a trunk full - or had until I moved the last time. I have been trying to sell novels for years.

But somehow that did not seem to be my field. So I began experimenting with non-fiction, and it was logical that, with a little encouragement, I should turn finally to my father as a subject. And what a subject.

* * *
Upshot was that I sold to Whittlesey House in April of this year a biography of father after they had seen only two chapters. The book will be published Oct. 14.

And singularly, a book I started to outline one week-end in Mason City probably will be my second. The publisher has already agreed on it in principal. So it appears that now I can do what I have always wanted to do: Write books.

* * *
Strangely enough, however, the dream I once had of doing nothing but writing books has gone. Ten years with as fascinating an organization as United Press has cured me of a writing career. It is still a hobby to write.

My work is thinking up ideas and selling them in the field of radio. Some day I would like to write a book about the radio business. But it will have to wait: I'm too busy having fun working.

* * *
I live alone and like it. I have an apartment in East 62nd street, just off Fifth Avenue, where my windows catch the breeze and the view from Central Park. I have a house in Riverside, Conn., to which I commute when I can.

My office is in the Daily News building and my office windows look out across two blocks of three-story buildings to the towers of the Chrysler, Chanin and Empire Stet buildings.

* * *
I am still a country boy getting a kick out of the big city. I like New York, fot it has been very good to me. But when people ask me where home is, I reply: "Mason City, Iowa."

NOTE: J. Hartzell Spence, born February 15, 1908, Marion, Iowa, was the founding editor of Yank, The Army Weekly, which was published during World War II in the United States. J. Hartzell Spence was traveling in Argentina when Pearl Harbor fell under attack. He immediately returned to the United States to join in the war effort. A former office in the reserves, he was commissioned a captain in the Army and was assigned to the new Army Publication, Yank. Issued at five-cents a copy, Yank was originally distributed only to servicemen who were on overseas duty. With approval to distribute within the United States, the magazine's distribution rose to over 200,000. Hartzel has been credited with coining the word "Pinup" to describe provocative photographs of popular movie stars he used in Yank. These pinup photographs often outlived the rest of the publication, appearing on foot lockers and the sides of buildings.

Hartzell also featured a cartoon strip, "Sad Sack," in the publication which commented on an average soldier's life during the war. "Sad Sack" enjoyed strong popularity long after the war was over.

During the early years of the war, Hartzell commented, "Civilains can't buy it [Yank] because mothers and wives would must naturally worry about some of the stuff they read in it." This, of course, included Yank's pinup pages.

Hartzel commented that Yank went a long way toward giving an enlisted man his due in the war, saying, "There's a bad habit of calling an officer a hero and forgetting the men who went through the same fire as he did and conducted themselves just as well."

Hartzell was transferred to the Army Air Corps as special assistant to Gen. Lauris Norstad. In 1945 he received the Legion of Merit.

After World War II, he retired to his farm, "Gaston Hall" located near Orange, Virginia.

He wrote two historical novels on the Spanish conquest of South America, Happily Ever After about his farming adventures in 1949; and his memoir One Foot in Heaven in 1941, and the sequel Get Thee Behind Me: My Life As A Preacher's Son. One Foot in Heaven was selected by the Book of the Month Club, dramatized for network radio and was made into a motion picture film in 1941, starring Fredric March and Martha Scott. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, losing to How Green Was My Valley. He was one of the original stockholders of WMJA Radio, Orange, Virginia.

John Hartzell Spence died at the age of 93 years on May 9, 2001, Essex, Connecticut. He was interred at Riverview Cemetery, Centerbrook, Connecticut.

~ ~ ~ ~
The Globe Gazette
Mason City, Cerro Gordo County, Iowa
Saturday, September 14, 1940, Page 11

"One Foot in Heaven,"
Doctor Spence Story, Sold to Warner Studio

The life of Doctor William H. Spence, former pastor of the First Methodist church in Mason City, is to be depicted in a Warner Brothers movie production.

Warner Brothers announced Saturday the purchase of "One Foot in Heaven - the Life of a Practical Parson," much sought biography of his father by Hartzell Spence of the New York United Press staff.

Although the book will not be published until next month, it has been the object of spirited bidding among motion picture producers since they first saw the alley proofs.

Jack L. Warner, vice president in charge of production, said the biography would be filmed with an all-star cast to support the real life Methodist minister the studio seeks to play the role of William H. Spence, the writer's clergyman father.

Photographs courtesy of Globe-Gazette

Additional information from THURBER, Jon. "Hartzell Spence - Pioneer of Pinups." Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles CA. Tues., 29 May 2001.

Transcriptions and note by Sharon R. Becker, May of 2014

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