Yankee Editor
One murky night during World War II, a German submariner waded ashore on a desolate stretch of the Long Island coast. In his pockets when he was captured, along with survival gear and whatever tools of espionage deemed most immediately helpful in bringing the USA to its knees, was a copy of The Old Farmer's Almanac. The government promptly banned the venerable Almanac from newstands, lest the enemy be clued in too reliably on weather-to-be along the seaboard.
As JUDSON D. HALE '55 of Dublin, N.H., current OFA editor, tells it, the unsolicited testimonial from Uncle Sam, while flattering, was hard on business. His predecessor, the late Robb Sagendorph, resolved the predicament by rechristening the weather forecasts "Weather Indications." An American institution already 150 years old was restored, and German spies presumably could not be quite so confident henceforth about when conditions would be favorable for infiltration. Hale's hunch is that the intruder was using the Almanac's tide tables, which are even more reliable than its remarkably accurate weather predictions.
In prophesying the weather more than a year in advance, Hale and publisher C. Robertson Trowbridge follow a formula based primarily on long-range weather patterns and sunspot cycles. "The universe runs in strange and mysterious ways," Hale says, "and there's a cyclical pattern in everything: man, animals, the seasons, the planets."
The format for weather forecasts in the 180th annual edition is new, arranged month by month for ten separate regions from coast to coast, but the formula used by 12 successive editors remains the same. Since Sagendorph reclaimed the OF A in the late '30s from a near disastrous streamlining which had caused circulation to slump to 85,000, the annual has been the familiar agglomerate of conundrums, astrology charts, planting guides, recipes, and home-spun features. The previous owners had modified weather predictions to averages, which Hale likens to telling a man with one foot in boiling water and the other in ice that he's comfortable because the mean temperature is a moderate 122 degrees.
The two-million-plus press run of the 1972 OFA has all the old flavor. It instructs the concerned how to calculate what day of the week Great Grandma was born and informs him about the gestation period of the buffalo. Its advertisements urge readers to combine fun and profit by raising chinchillas, to firm their dentures, reduce their ruptures, live it up with false sideburns, catch fish with gypsy oil "or money back."
Although compiling the OFA is a year-long venture climaxing in the fall, the annual takes a back seat in day-by-day operations to Yankee magazine, a monthly with a circulation of some 600,000, half of it outside New England.
The editor credits Yankee's phenomenal success to authenticity, and this in turn to what he calls "insidersmanship." "I edit Yankee for New Englanders who live here," Hale emphasizes. Insidersmanship, he is convinced, is what distinguishes Yankee's approach from that of any national journal, however professional, which almost inevitably falls into a vaguely condescending 'quaint-characters picturesque-landscape' ersatz folksiness in writing about New England. "We avoid colloquialisms and 'ay-uh' type stories," concentrating instead on the area as it is. Hale sees Yankee as "an entity in itself," with a personality and an image self-created out of its authenticity.
About half the articles in Yankee are written by freelancers from throughout the six-state area, the rest by an editorial staff of six. Subject matter is strictly New England or "in the context." Oceans, for instance, are considered appropriate material, since the sea, "even if it's off the Australian coast, seems somehow to belong to New England."
Hale attributes Yankee's spectacular growth from 40,000 circulation in 1958 to this month's 625,000 print order to a yearning for reassurance that life doesn't need to be as complicated as it seems, that somewhere there remain order, enthusiasm, creativity, and lasting values. Yankee, Inc. is riding the wave of popularity with expanded operations. A new Yankee Press, with offices in Boston, is taking over book publication, formerly squeezed into brief lulls in publication schedules of the OFA, Yankee, and the annual Cape Cod Compass, and adding to the list of titles.
Hale is a bona fide New Englander with credentials from four states. Born of Bostonian parents, reared in Maine, schooled in Connecticut, and domiciled in New Hampshire for 14 years plus four at Dartmouth, he is deeply committed to Yankee ways, 1972 model. The life style of the village, the town meeting approach to problems, volunteerism in community affairs, skiing in winter, sailing in summer, football games in the fall and, closely accessible, the lively cultural fare of Boston and the Hopkins Center—these are the ingredients of Judson Hale's northern New England living.
Richard Benjamin
