ransvestia

together. The original scheme was that I would get the material together and set it up, mail it down to Bob (Barbara) in Nashville who, since he had access to an offset press would undertake to print it up and ship it back to me and I would mail it out. While these conversations were going on by mail the bottom fell out of the idea because Bob got fired from that job, so the advent of a magazine had a set back of a couple of years.

A couple of years of thinking it over and I finally decided that I would take a whirl at doing it by myself. So I made up a prospectus and mailed it to everyone that I had ever heard of with a request that they spread the word around. This included all the people on Johnny's mailing list and any other that he had made contact with since. After a time I had collected 25 subscribers at $4.00 apiece. After holding that $100 for a month or so in the hopes that more would turn up, I decided that I'd better get the ball rolling and give them something for their money. So I composed the first issue of Transvestia-using the name I had invented originally for Johnny's ill-fated venture. At that time I owned my own business and for some reason long forgotten, had confided in my secretary who was a woman about my own age and with three children. She was accepting and she typed up the manuscripts for the first two issues for me. I then found an offset printer and had a hundred copies printed up. The first issue was mailed out in January 1960. It had a couple of stories in it, which I am embarrassed to report, were the dominant woman type-this was before I learned enough about the nature of the TV phenomenon to take a stand in favor of self responsibility and thus refused to go into the domination issue in later issues. But the magazine was well received. I have just gone back and looked over the early issues and find many letters of appreciation and encouragement in them. So it seemed there was enough support there to continue. I asked the few subscribers I had to speak about the magazine to others that they knew and urged them to contribute material to it as I had no intention of trying to write it all myself. I acquired some names from lists of other people and from very limited advertising and one way or another we grew, though slowly.

By the time we had reached No. 10 or 12, my old correspondent from Nashville, Bob turned up in Los Angeles and looked me up. We talked about the magazine, as it was, over several weeks and then he came up with the idea that since he was experienced in advertising,

28