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Producer-on-wheels Margaret Webster, back in Manhattan temporarily after carrying Shakespeare to the hinterlands, declared that she "felt free" only when she was away from New York. Most of her non-Broadway audiences had never seen a professional play before and "they approach a play in the same manner they would a football match. If they enjoy it they stamp and whistle wildly at the end . . . They eat everything, gum, popcorn, crispies. We know the show's been a success by the size of the pile of candy wrappers left behind...
...mail-order business grew so fast that within a few months he had filled his basement with books to be mailed. When his wife protested that she hadn't enough room to do the washing, he moved his Webster Publishing Co. (named after Noah and Daniel) to two rat-infested rooms on the riverfront. Within three years, Webster's sales amounted to $102,000. By 1928, they had doubled. By 1931, W.P. had another idea...
...first: to publish a speller that would include pronunciation, meaning and usage, with exercises to match. The new speller and workbook swept the nation. Over the years, every schoolchild in Texas and Alabama, and half of those in ten other states were learning their spelling and vocabulary simultaneously. The Webster books found their way into such big cities as New York, to the Philippines and Alaska, and via missionaries to China, India, and the Belgian Congo...
Today, after 25 years, W.P.'s Webster Publishing Co. of St. Louis is at the top of the U.S. speller business and his idea has spread. Other publishers have long since begun turning out workbooks like Johnson's. Last week, at W.P.'s silver anniversary banquet, President Robie D. Marriner of the American Textbook Publishers Institute called the Johnson workbook "as significant as any contribution of teacher training itself during the last 25 years." To W.P., it was significant for another reason: it just went to show, he told banqueters, that a man can start with...
...since 1937, except for a year with Eva Le Gallienne and Margaret Webster running the ill-fated American Repertory Theater, Producer Crawford hunts tirelessly for scripts that offer "something different." Now on her schedule: a melodrama, a musical and a new Paul Green adaptation of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, starring John Garfield...