The Cleveland Journal's Sunday Magazine

 

Oh, Boys and Girls and everyone on their own Self Identified Spectrum of Gender, Cookie is dating himself when he tells you that there were once big fat Sunday Newspapers, chock full of news, features, travel, living, life, living life, and sports section.  

Classifieds were in their own chunky section! Comics galore in COLOR!  And then there were the locally produced Sunday Magazine inserts, printed on better paper that were sort of shiny.  They had long articles and short stories of featured articles.  The articles were heavy with local content,  with locally placed writers and headlines like "HIGHLAND HEIGHTS CELEBRATES THE ANNUAL GOURD FESTIVAL" and  "AMRAP, LOOKING AT PARMA DIFFERENTLY".

Sadly, over the last 30-40 years, these magazines have been discontinued in all of the most ginormous markets, replaced with PARADE, itself just a shadow of its former glory.  Headlines now include "Affirming Yourself" and "Celebrity Gossip" which really isn't gossip, such as "What's Joan Van Ark Up to These Days?" and Harry Styles, Does He Date?"  (The answers usually read,  "Former TV Star Joan Van Ark was born in 1943, and business herself with reading and taking longs walks on the beach," and "MEGA Star Harry Styles, born in 1994, is very much in demand, and a well know fashionista. Perhaps he'll update us on activities when cupid acts.")  So it really isn't in-depth, or mildly interesting.   

The Cleveland Daily Journal's Sunday Magazine also had local gossip ("Our sources tell us that Mrs. Edwin Smith Standish, of Shaker Heights, has been tapped to Chair the Cleveland Symponic's Societies annual Fund Raiser which will be themed Escapade in the Equidor, this winter..." and "Our sources tell us that Cleveland City Council member Mary Rose Oakar is a career-minded lady who hopes to become a congressional representative..."

Alas, the Journal ended its role as Cleveland's fifth most popular news source in 1963.  

The building, is now the Lake Line Luxury Lofts, market-rate condos, decorated in neutral gray tones, offering exquisite views of downtown Cleveland ("that you will not find in any other location!" because only one building stands on its site, right?) and the I-71 corridor.  

The main floors, once populated with well-known locally owned businesses along with the Cleveland Curmudgeon Club, and Stouffer's Slid on Inn, is now populated with expensive tightly focused boutiques (Raffia Rendezvous, Birkin and Birkenstock's, for example) and a raw-juice bar that you could find in any city. And the perfunctory Starbucks, of course. 

Condo Board Quarterly

Surely you are curious about the Condominium Life Style.   That freewheeling world where everyone owns their slice of heaven, but the halls are community property.  And the most important body in any "Condo", as the hippest people call it?  The Board because it has a fiduciary responsibility to make sure that everything is running smooth and that no problem is overlooked, from 15M's sliding glass door to 3V's insatiable need for a new key to the laundry facility.  Of course, keeping up meeting attendance is vital because no one should feel left out.

Modern Step Mother, September 1961

Real Life Men's Stories, September 1961

My father wasn't a happy man.  Oh, he had everything that should have made him happy.  A wife, three children, two new Impala's in the garage that he paid cash for right off the show room floor.

But what he didn't have was excitement, and he wasn't an object of desire.

The people behind this magazine knew that.  And they knew that if he didn't have it in real life, he could live it vicariously through their monthly rag.

Real Life Men's Stories was a magazine that broke all the rules - from their shocking and true exposes to their utter contempt for good grammar, this was a magazine that didn't have time for the niceties of fact checking or proof reading.

It had a mission and that mission was connect men with their visceral need to fight for what was good and right, even when confronted with the necessity of gun violence and women so ripe that they fell out of the tree and onto the hard cold ground of survival of the fittest.

In addition to jammed packed stories of wayward men and the women that made them leave the straight and narrow road of respectability, there were also loads of ads.  We're talking thousands of tiny ads for every get rich quick scheme ever imagined.  From X-Ray Spec's to Fish Farming For Fun (or Profit), this is the way the real world gets by, damn it.

Wives pooh-pooh'd these magazines, forcing men like my father to hide them under their beds.  But it was worth it, damn it.  The truth had to be told.  Come the revolution, you'll need to know how to survive in the face of sex starved zombies and single digit IQ'd mercenaries.  And after they drop the bomb, it could be you and your buddy alone on earth with hot tempered Virago's.  They will need your seed to create new life, and you'll need to be ready to pick them off.  This is the periodical that will show you how to get job number 1 done.

Thats what a real man's world is all about.