A generation ago, a young Baltimore insurance salesman yearned for the writer's life. How could he get his name on a newspaper's payroll? The advice of an Evening Sun acquaintance was direct: Write an article, sell it to an editor, have a clipping with your byline on it. Have a bunch of clippings.
So he got in touch with Sun Magazine. Shortly afterward, it published an illustrated piece on the city employee whose job included scrubbing, weekly, all 228 stone steps inside the Washington Monument.
It took several additional magazine articles and more than a year but, sure enough, The Sun hired R. H. Gardner; he went on to a satisfying career here, 30 years of it as drama and film critic.
Ben Herman's first magazine story idea came to him in 1950, while he was a Johns Hopkins undergraduate. A Buddhist holy man was visiting Owen Lattimore of the Hopkins faculty. Herman wrote a story about the holy man and sold it to the magazine.
Though tickled by the sight of his name in print, Herman got a day job teaching at North Point Junior High. Off-duty, he scored with other story suggestions, relating especially to Maryland history.
Almost 100 Herman bylines later, the magazine's editor, Hal Williams, sighed and said, "No more." Herman shrugged, turned to fiction, and now is the author of widely praised stories and novels set in his native Dundalk. "But I've never forgotten," he says, "the thrill of that first $15 check."
At the start, in 1946, the magazine's articles were done in-house. But as early as the third issue, two articles were by free-lancers: Raymond B. O'Rourke, a Cumberland newspaperman (on fox-hunting after dark, on foot), and Bonnie Gay (on a teen-age slumber party at 3720 Hillsdale Road).
In February, a free-lancer scored the magazine's first bull's-eye. The Baltimore architect John H. Scarff, on a postwar government mission abroad, had visited southwest Ireland. His photos and prose lighted up a small, different, faraway port named Baltimore.
It was an Eastern Shore free-lancer, Dickson J. Preston, who later startled Maryland by revealing in Sun Magazine that the trunk of the nation's noblest white oak tree, the mighty Wye Oak, was mostly hollow.
The magazine never got anything out of H. L. Mencken, but Gerald W. Johnson, his comrade in the sagacity game, wrote brilliantly on "Why Live in Baltimore" (rather than outside).
