Jimmy Green Years (1945 To 1987)
The magazine was started as a monthly by PW "Jimmy" Green in 1945, with the first few issues produced from the back bedroom of a bungalow in Kent which Green shared with his wife, Pam.
With post-war paper rationing still in force, Green used a mixture of determination and devilment to launch the first, self-published edition. It was numbered Volume II Issue I, but this was a deliberate error to fool the government into thinking the magazine had existed before the war. There was, of course, never a Volume I.
Green was also told by athletics and publishing experts that the idea would never work. “I thanked them for their advice and completely ignored it. I was pig headed,” said Green. Green's magazine went weekly in January 1950, published on Fridays, and has never failed to come out since.
In 1968, Green (who died in 1998, aged 88) passed the editorship to the enthusiastic and knowledgeable Mel Watman, who in a near-20-year reign steered the title to some success and continued to build its reputation for accuracy and authority.
Independently published by Kent Art Printers in a distinctive A5, pocket-sized format, the magazine reached its peak of popularity in the mid-1980s - coinciding with the marathon running boom following the first London Marathon in 1981 - selling some 25,000 copies per week.
Read more about this topic: Athletics Weekly
Famous quotes containing the words jimmy, green and/or years:
“You’re so sly and so am I.”
—Michael Mann, U.S. screenwriter. Jimmy Price (Dan E. Butler)
“It seemed like this was one big Prozac nation, one big mess of malaise. Perhaps the next time half a million people gather for a protest march on the White House green it will not be for abortion rights or gay liberation, but because we’re all so bummed out.”
—Elizabeth Wurtzel, U.S. author. Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America, p. 298, Houghton Mifflin (1994)
“As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relations with this best and truest friend of mankind, that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling! And I thank my God for graciously granting me the opportunity ... of learning that death is the key which unlocks the door to our true happiness.”
—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)