Street & Smith Publications regularly featured holiday covers, particularly around Christmas or New Year’s Day. The publisher seems to have started the tradition of releasing a “holiday number” in The Popular Magazine. As early as 1904 — in the pulp magazine’s second year — the December issue advertised “Holiday Temptations” on its cover, and featured a woman standing under a sprig of mistletoe. The tradition of running “Fine Christmas Stories” around the holidays was continued largely uninterrupted in The Popular Magazine through the Second January Number of 1930.
About a year after establishing Detective Story Magazine — the first specialized pulp fiction magazine — Street & Smith began to include a Christmas story or two around the winter holidays. With its December 23, 1919 issue, the company began advertising, “Sparkling Christmas Stories,” above the Detective Story masthead.
The publisher featured similar advertising on many of their other specialty pulps, including Love Story Magazine, Western Story Magazine, and Wild West Weekly. You’ll find “A Christmas Novel,” by Frank Richardson Pierce, as late as the December 1948 number of Western Story, not long before the publisher pulled the plug on all of their pulp magazines. Frank Tinsley’s cover art shows a cowpoke on a horse. A Christmas-like star shines above.
One Street & Smith specialty fiction pulp where the holidays didn’t seem to take hold was Sport Story Magazine. Debuting with its September 8, 1923 issue, the Street & Smith sports fiction pulp usually featured winter sports — hockey, ice skating, sledding, and skiing — on their December through February covers of the 1920s. By the early thirties, this had dwindled down to a single hockey or skiing cover as football, basketball, and boxing began to dominate the covers during the winter months.
Only for a brief period from late 1925 through early 1930 did the Christmas spirit “thrill the crowd” that favored the Street & Smith sports pulp.
Although the masthead for the December 22, 1925 number of Sport Story Magazine read, “Help It Grow. Tell Somebody Else,” the issue featured a horse racing story written by Sam Carson. Its title was “The Christmas Handicap.” Exactly a year later with the same masthead, the magazine featured Raoul Whitfield’s “Santa Claus Subs” and “The Christmas Cheer Leader” by William Bruner among its stories.
The December 22, 1927 issue of Sport Story Magazine — with cover art by Freeland Carter — seems to be the most holiday-oriented issue of the Street & Smith pulp. Labeled the “Christmas Number” it featured Kingsley Moses’ “The Christmas Kid,” “Santa Knows His Skates,” by James Aswell, a couple of ice hockey stories by Whitfield and H. L. McPherson, and “Wooden Wings,” a skiing story written by Frank Eugene Orseno.
The year following, Street & Smith delayed their Christmas issue for a month, releasing their “Holiday Number” with the “Second January Number” of 1929. This was done intentionally, as the pulp would appear on newsstands on December 22, just a few days before the holiday. Once again, the magazine featured a Freeland Carter cover and a Kingsley Moses story, “The Christmas Ghost.”
Freeland Carter likewise contributed the cover art for the “Second January Number” of 1930 — a skiing cover — with “‘Down the Chimney’ By Philip Struggs and other Christmas Stories” displayed on the front cover. Raoul Whitfield’s “Santa Claus Flies” is among the issue’s stories.
Although the January 1931 issues feature hockey and skiing on their covers, there is not a word about the holiday — not on the cover nor on the contents page. B. B. Fowler would offer “In this Corner — Santa Claus” in 1932 and Robert N. Bryan would leave “A Foul on Santa Claus” under January 1933’s yuletide tree. Afterward, Christmas seemed to be banished from the Street & Smith sports pulp.
Given that the audience for Sport Story Magazine was overwhelmingly male, it is likely the Street & Smith circulation department decided that sports and Christmas really didn’t mix. The holiday couldn’t compete with a championship fight, a game-winning touchdown pass, the thrills of the World Series, or a high-speed auto race.
Regardless of how the Scrooges who worked for the Street & Smith circulation department felt about sports and Christmas, your friends from PulpFest — Mike Chomko, Jack and Sally Cullers, Bill Lampkin, Sara Light-Waller, Craig McDonald, William Patrick Maynard, and Barry Traylor — would like to wish everyone a healthy and happy holiday season. We’ll be back one week from today, as we enjoy some time off with our families.
Freeland A. Carter studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. A successful book and magazine artist, he began to contribute to Street & Smith’s Sport Story Magazine as a cover artist and interior illustrator during the pulp’s early years. His work was usually signed only with his initials, “F.A.C.”
After 1933, the winter holidays would be acknowledged by Street & Smith’s Sport Story Magazine with a single cover featuring ice hockey or skiing. Although best remembered for his “good girl” cover art for the girlie pulps and Standard Magazine’s science fiction pulps, Earle K. Bergey was one of the leading cover illustrators for the sports pulps. Pictured above is his cover art for the First Number of Street & Smith’s Sport Story Magazine for January 1937. The issue featured the beginning of a four-part hockey serial written by Leslie McFarlane, a poem entitled “Hockey Offense” that was composed by Arthur L. Rafter, and an article by Jack Adams, the longtime coach of the Detroit Red Wings.
Our featured image is by James Clark Work who also painted a good number of covers for Street & Smith’s Love Story Magazine. It’s the first February number for 1939 of Sport Story Magazine.
