Grit (newspaper)
| Editor in Chief | Caleb D. Regan |
|---|---|
| Managing Editor | Kellsey Trimble |
| Senior Associate Editor | Traci Smith |
| Categories | Rural lifestyle |
| Frequency | Bi-monthly |
| Circulation | 150,000 |
| Publisher | Bill Uhler |
| Founder | Dietrick Lamade |
| Year founded | 1882 |
| First issue | December 1882 |
| Company | Ogden Publications, Inc. |
| Country | USA |
| Based in | Topeka, Kansas |
| Language | English |
| Website | grit |
| ISSN | 0017-4289 |
| OCLC number | 190847592 |
Grit is a magazine, formerly a weekly newspaper, popular in the rural US during much of the 20th century. It carried the subtitle "America's Greatest Family Newspaper". In the early 1930s, it targeted small town and rural families with 14 pages plus a fiction supplement. By 1932, it had a circulation of 425,000 in 48 states, and 83% of its circulation was in towns of fewer than 10,000 population.
The publication was founded in 1882 as the Saturday edition of the Williamsport, Pennsylvania, Daily Sun and Banner. In 1885, the name was purchased for $1,000 by 25-year-old German immigrant Dietrick Lamade (pronounced Lam'-a-dee), who established a circulation of 4,000 during the first year.
Lamade was born February 6, 1859, in Gölshausen, Germany, one of nine children of Johannes Dietrick and Caroline Stuepfle Lamade. The family moved to Williamsport in 1867, where Johannes died of typhoid fever on January 1, 1869. To support the family, Dietrick, his sister, and his older brothers quit school. At age ten, Dietrick began working as an errand boy, earning a weekly salary of $3 in the office of a local German-language weekly, Beobachter (literally Observer), when he was 13 years old.
At 18, Lamade began printing theater programs and a four-page ad brochure, the Merchants' Free Press. In the summer of 1880, he did Camp News for the Pennsylvania National Guard, and he married the following year. In 1882, Lamade became the ad compositor and assistant composing room foreman for the Daily Sun and Banner, and that same year, Grit began as the paper's Saturday edition, typeset by Lamade. He left the Daily Sun in 1884 to launch the weekly Times as a daily, but finances and the health of the owner led the Times to cease publication. With two children and no job, 25-year-old Lamade became a publisher. Teaming with two partners, he bought the Times equipment plus the Grit name and goodwill. During his first year, he increased Grit's circulation to 4,000. He operated from a third-floor single room, moving to a storefront location in 1886, establishing a weekly circulation of 20,000 by 1887.
With rapid expansion, a wagon of Remington typewriters was delivered to the Grit offices in 1892. In 1894, one member of the art department was the 16-year-old C. W. Kahles, later famed as the creator of the long-run comic strip Hairbreadth Harry.
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