With Hustle & Hope

Adman Bruce Barton (Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn) knows just how he sells products and ideas: "Say it simply, say it over & over, say it in one-syllable words." He rates the Lord's Prayer, the 23rd Psalm and the Gettysburg Address as triumphs of simplicity and brevity: each contains fewer than 500 words, mostly of one and two syllables. Last week Adman Barton was getting ready to turn out a new weekly column of personal and social comment for Hearst's King Features. It will be written in no more than 500 words, mostly of one and two syllables.

No newcomer to journalism, Barton once wrote editorials for a Sunday supplement called Every Week and then for Redbook magazine on such homely topics as prayer, success, happiness and free enterprise ("the system of hustle and hope"). After writing his bestselling life of Jesus (The Man Nobody Knows), depicting Him as "The Founder of Modern Business," Barton did a column ("Bruce Barton Says") for McClure's syndicate. Later he signed with King Features.

Barton dropped the column before his election to Congress from Manhattan's Republican "silk-stocking" district (1937), has long itched to resume it. Still hustling and hopeful at 63, Bruce Barton says: "I sometimes wrote [when I was younger] as though I knew all the answers. The years soften and finally annul that idea."

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