Lee Franklin, an employee of Carus Corp., has a problem common to all who toil under the broad span of its corporate umbrella.
”Even though I have been here 12 years, I still have difficulty explaining to people that I work for a company that produces potassium permanganate, philosophical publications and children`s literary magazines,” Franklin said.
About 100 miles southwest of Chicago, and just across the Illinois River from Starved Rock State Park, ”The Oxidant of Choice” meets ”Disputers of Tao” meets Cricket and Ladybug.
Carus Corp. has about 350 employees and annual sales of about $60 million from three surrealistically diverse subsidiaries-sort of the Tweedle-chem, Tweedle-hmm and Tweedle-kiddie of Midwestern business.
The first and driest of these is Carus Chemical Co., which claims to be the world`s largest producer of potassium permanganate (brand name Cairox:
”The Oxidant of Choice”), which is used in water and waste-water treatment to control taste, odor, algae and zebra mussels, among other things. The second Carus subsidiary is The Open Court Publishing Co., which produces reading and mathematics teaching programs for schoolchildren. The publishing arm also turns out about 30 books annually in the highbrow realms of philosophy, psychology, religion, public policy and cultural criticism. Its book list, which is unlikely to inspire any episodes of ”Oprah,” ”Donahue” or the gang, features brain-teasers such as ”Disputers of the Tao” and
”Grue! The New Riddle of Induction.”
The third subsidiary is home to Zoot the pygmy shrew, Weenie the New Jersey mosquito, Marty the huggable inchworm and associates. They are cast members of Cricket and Ladybug, two award-winning, monthly children`s magazines that feature the works of many of the world`s best illustrators and most respected writers.
Known as a hothouse for new talent (many of Cricket`s short stories are expanded into children`s books), the Carus magazines also feature the work of literary superstars such as Isaac Bashevis Singer, William Saroyan, John Updike, T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost.
Cricket has been hailed as ”the New Yorker of kiddie literature”
because of its high-quality contents. It has received the Parents` Choice award five times and, for five straight years, stories in it have captured the Paul A. Witty Short Story Award from the International Reading Association.
Family of many interests
The unlikely mix of children`s literary magazines, chemical production and textbook publishing makes for an interesting annual report, and sometimes confusing introductions, said Blouke Carus, Carus` cerebral president and chief executive officer.
”People often can`t figure us out,” Carus said. ”There are no other chemical companies in the publishing business, nor are there any other publishing companies in the chemical business.
”It is rather unusual, but our varied interests are all outgrowths of our family history,” he said. ”Even today, we are a family of many interests. We don`t have many boring dinner conversations.”
This strange corporate concoction began, strangely enough, with zinc and coal, Carus said. In 1857 two German metallurgical engineers, Edward C. Hegeler and Frederick W. Matthiessen, immigrated to the U.S. to begin a zinc- smelting business.
They found zinc ore deposits near Mineral Point, Wis., and Galena, Ill., but because the zinc-smelting process requires twice as much coal as zinc, they located their plant close to the nearest large coal deposit, which happened to be near Peru and its sister city, La Salle.
Hegeler was an intellectual who studied philosophy and religion. He believed that no religion or culture had a monopoly on truth, but each had its own truths that could be proved through scientific study.
To spread his beliefs, Hegeler founded The Open Court magazine in 1887 and hired as editor Paul Carus, another German intellectual, who later married Hegeler`s daughter.
Subsidized by the zinc plant, the publishing operation expanded to include a scholarly journal, The Monist, which is still issued as an international quarterly devoted to ”general philosophical inquiry” by the Hegeler Institute, a not-for-profit foundation funded by the Carus family.
Intellectual diversions
Hegeler`s original editor, Carus, wrote 50 books, and it is his great-grandson, Blouke, who today heads the family-held corporation. Like Hegeler, Blouke Carus is an engineer with a great many intellectual diversions, but education is his chief avocation.
He has served on committees for the U.S. Department of Education and the Illinois Board of Education. He also is the primary force in this country behind the International Baccalaureate. The two-year college-prep program, based in Geneva, Switzerland, promotes international understanding by encouraging students to attend universities and colleges around the world.
Blouke Carus grew up in La Salle-Peru and earned a degree in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology before going on to the University of Freiburg in Germany (”because I wanted to learn other languages”) to study chemistry.
It was there that Carus met his future wife, Marianne, a native of the Rhineland region of Germany, who was studying English and German literature. They later studied French literature and art history at the Sorbonne in Paris. After marrying, the couple moved back to Peru and the Carus family business, which had changed its chemical production focus from zinc to ”the more interesting” potassium permanganate, Carus said.
”One of my father`s college professors suggested that he get into permanganate, because no one in this country was producing it, so he took the advice and began making it in the bathtub from scratch,” Carus said.
Cricket magazine emerged from another room in the house of Carus: the nursery. ”When our first child was learning to read, we bought him children`s books, but most of them seemed to have absolutely no content, and my husband said our son wasn`t learning anything from them,” Marianne Carus said.
She began searching for quality literature for children and eventually found it in the University of Chicago Library, where she discovered old copies of St. Nicholas, a children`s magazine edited by Mary Mapes Dodge, author of
”Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates.”
St. Nicholas contained many classic children`s stories, but it had ceased publishing in the 1930s. ”I could only find a few issues of it, so in 1972 my husband and I decided to start a new St. Nicholas with just as high literary standards,” she said.
”At the time there were at least 85 other children`s magazines already on the market-even more now-and people told us we were lunatics. We were quite naive.”
Naive, perhaps, but ingenious.
”We made a good move early on when we asked Clifton Fadiman, a former book reviewer for the New Yorker, to join us as a senior editor,” Marianne Carus said.
”He knew all of the most prominent authors, and together we wrote 300 letters asking if they had anything in their desk drawers for our magazine.” The late Isaac Bashevis Singer, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1978, agreed to join the editorial advisory board of Cricket, and he even submitted a manuscript for the first issue.
”I was scared stiff to edit it,” Marianne Carus said. ”But I cut it in half and he was very nice. He liked what I did.”
The late William Saroyan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and author, also submitted a story to Carus.
”It wasn`t very good. It rambled on and really wasn`t for kids. Considering who the author was, I was scared to send it back, but I did,” she said.
To her surprise, Saroyan tried again. ”He submitted another story and I cut it in half and he didn`t mind.”
Singer and Saroyan received the standard payment of 25 cents a word, which is what the Carus magazines still pay to all contributors, famous or not. The price must still be all right: The magazines receive about 1,500 unsolicited written submissions and 70 illustration portfolios a month.
The writer`s ”slush pile” is culled by three free-lance editors who forward only about 10 percent to the editors in Peru, where 18 magazine employees work amid high ceilings and pastel hues in the elegantly restored turn-of-the-century headquarters of the former Westclox timepiece company.
Cricket was originally produced in cramped quarters above a notorious downtown drinking and gambling den. Today, Cricket and Ladybug, which was launched just two years ago, are housed in an airy publishing playpen that features an impressive children`s reference library and hundreds of toy crickets and ladybugs crawling about.
Geared to 6- through 12-year-olds, Cricket has a paid circulation of 110,000. Ladybug, for 2- through 7-year-olds, reaches 130,000. (Annual subscription rates are $29.97 for each magazine.)
The leading general-interest children`s magazines, such as Highlights for Children, often reach more than 1 million subscribers, but the Carus magazines aim for a different audience, Marianne Carus said.
”I wish we had more subscribers, but it is not so easy to find them if you have something that is not for the masses-particularly with the climate in this country of instant gratification. Many parents don`t have time to read longer stories or to teach their children the joys of reading,” she said.
Globe-trotting couple
Although neither magazine carries advertising, each operates in the black and has the sort of reader demographics most publishers covet. About 90 percent of Cricket`s readers come from high-income families in which at least one parent has a postgraduate degree, Marianne Carus said.
The Caruses are a globe-trotting couple who believe in expanding the horizons of young people, and to that end Cricket regularly features children`s stories and folk tales translated from other languages.
Although their editorial standards are high, Cricket and Ladybug are far from stuffy publications. The typical mix includes short stories, true-life tales, jokes, cartoons, crossword puzzles and cutouts.
Unique features include the appearance of Zoot and friends in the margins to explain difficult words (”Dilapidated means shabby and run-down”) and the Cricket League section to which young readers submit their own written works. One Cricket League submission last summer began with a captivating sentence that undoubtedly inspired admiration and bittersweet childhood memories among employees throughout the multifaceted Carus Corp.
Wrote Renee Albe, 14, of Maplewood, N.J.:
”I only remember two things from when I was seven: The time I got a bingo chip stuck up my nose and had to go to the hospital to have it removed, and the fights I had with my sister, Jane.”
