Gettysburg Magazine

Gettysburg Magazine was Bob Younger’s baby. He started it, and he made the rules. Bob believed that the honor of being published in his magazine should be reward enough; if you wanted to be paid you had to ask for it. Those checks would come, but I always got the sense I was imposing on him to even ask. However, I have always insisted on being paid simply because of the principle of the thing.

One of Bob’s primary rules was no advertising. If you look at an issue of the magazine, you will find nary a single advertisement. This meant that either (a) the issue had to be paid for in full by subscription and bookstore sales or (b) it lost money regularly. Mix in Bob’s irascible nature and the fact that there was no national distributor, and it’s no surprise that this magazine was never a moneymaker for Morningside. Bob once told me that he and his wife Mary regularly had to subsidize the thing.

Also, Bob alienated enough of his authors that people stopped writing for him. I certainly did. When he decided that I was the enemy because we couldn’t get a bank to finance the deal, that was the end of my efforts to write for him, even though I have had lots of ideas of things that would have made for good articles for the magazine. I am far from alone in this. Consequently, in the past several years, the overall quality of the articles that have been published in the magazine has dropped significantly. For one good example, one of the licensed battlefield guides has propounded a bizarre theory that because the monument to the 5th New York Cavalry was moved, the rest of the monuments to Farnsworth’s brigade also were going to be moved. This person, in fact, contended that the veterans had been PROMISED that their monuments would be moved. The problem with this is that it was entirely and completely fabricated. There is no footnote for this proposition; there can’t be one–the records of the Gettysburg Battlefield Monument Association do not reflect any such thing. Yet, this nonsense crept through and was published.

Now, I’m all for theories that push the envelope. However, my support for and tolerance of these theories ends when they depend on material that is completely and totally fabricated. Had someone bothered to read this festering pile of garbage and hold it to the sorts of standards that marked the early years of the magazine, it never would have been published and put out there to intentionally mislead the public, as the author has set out to do. There is no quality control or consistency, and I have heard this complaint many, many times from many people.

This magazine has offered a great deal, and was once great. It can be great again. While Bob Younger’s passing was a tragedy, it nevertheless offers an opportunity to rejuvenate the magazine and make it great again now that it’s no longer under his thumb. With him gone, I would be willing to write for it again. Let’s hope that whoever is now in charge recognizes this opportunity and seizes it and does something good with it. Time will tell.