Traveling Salesman Magazine, April 1946

Every month, Traveling Salesman Magazine brought to its readers a sense that they had a friend in an office in Iowa who cared about them and their life out on the road.  Since its readership traveled, subscriptions weren't allowed, and the magazine didn't ship C.O.D.   You paid cash at your Statnard Oil station or bought it in the Grayhound station.  Brush salesmen, vacuum salesmen, even bible salesmen all needed some companionship that didn't involve a local yokel's man-hungry daughter.  Their hotels may be flea-infested, and Old Lady Smith is happy to see the seed salesman show up with her latest "Burpy" Seed Catalog, with its promises of tropical splendor for Maine, but a guy works hard, even if his name is Willie Loman.  Pick up a copy and hit the road.

Idiom is an Ugly Word

"'Mercy Maude, Moe.  Will you just let it drop?"  But Moe D'Yard couldn't let it go. "I hear she's a regular bunnyboiler."  And Moe was like a terrier on a bone, but that was neither here nor there.   Behind his back, his friends all said "Jesus Christ on a cracker, but Moe better snap out it before he loses that job and corner office at Smear Magazine."  And it was true.  The new owner, Monica Mayhew had the Herculean task of turn that boat around.  And Moe D'Yard was the best in show to get the job done. Could he do the job and Monica at the same time, or was the baby out with the bathwater, for both of them and the once-monthly rag that had them by the tits.  From the pen of Roburt LeSabre, author of the shocking GABRIEL'S STRUMPET comes a tale that is so ripe it's about to fall of the tree of great books of the 1940s.  Only PROBE PUBLICATIONS dares to print today's stories that need to be told in ink."

1959: Father What A Waste

"The story of Father Chance McCoy was one that only Channing Carlton could bring to life."

"Father Chance, taking on his first assignment, a French Canadian mill town of Avecmoi was eager to help. Yet those confessing sin held back, and most of the congregation seemed to be probing his soul instead of finding comfort in his sermons.   At first, he feels the lack of acceptance is because of his youth, but the whispers of the grandmothers who called him "Father What A Waste" left him spiritually enervated.  Though he did his best to overcome these remarks, he knew that the wives of town came to him for a type of comfort he was unprepared to deliver. Their husbands looked at him with resentment and distrust.  Yet there were only two who understood those unspoken needs that left him aching for acceptance, the art teacher, and the lacrosse coach in the town's public school. Their time together, the turgid hours of understanding and fulfillment, lips in discourse about Descarte and scrums. Could the "pretty boy priest" save himself from the unspoken lust others had for him, or would he become a fallen angel himself?"