Just Among Us Girls

Like millions of working girls, tilt-nosed Betty Oliver was tired of waiting for heaven to protect her. At 34, she was bored with her job and with herself. In her drab little office in Dallas, one day in 1945, she began scrawling doodles in her shorthand notebook. They became the first crude dummies of a magazine for girls like herself. Last week her Business Girl, launched with $7.50 capital, was out of the red and she was ready to ask her stockholders to recapitalize at a round $250,000.

The original $7.50 went for stationery. For months after Betty Oliver quit her $250-a-month job, she an; Business Girl all but starved. "I had to sell a subscription before I could eat lunch," she says. "I had one suit and wore it all week, and had it cleaned over the weekend while I stayed home and did the editorial work."

Her maiden, pocket-sized issue went to 4,000 white-collar girls--and used up all the subscription money they had paid in. To keep going, Betty went to a bank (for $1,000), to Dallas Oilman Harold D. Byrd (for $5,000 and a partnership), and to 90 Texans whom she invited to a free chicken dinner. With dessert she served a 45-minute speech, talked 45 of her guests into buying $8,600 worth of stock.

By last week Business Girl had 40,000 subscribers, a well-fed look and a comfortable showing of ads, mostly plugging Dallas-born fashions. Betty Oliver is paying herself $450 a month, employs her husband of three months, ex-G.I. Jack Stewart, as advertising director. Some of her issues look as cluttered as the inside of a stenographer's purse, but the stenographers seem to like it that way. The contents run to bootstrap success stories, needlepoint notes, advice on hairdos and boy friends, with a confidential editor's memo printed in Miss Oliver's own Gregg shorthand.

The editor knows her business girls better than they know themselves. By bombarding them with questionnaires, she has learned that they earn an average of $170 a month, that 71% of them chew gum, only 37% smoke 63% are single and 95% think (wishfully or otherwise) that it is not a man's world.

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