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The PLAIN TRUTH
a magazine of understanding
Pasadena California 91123
HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
November 12. 1984
Dear PLAIN TRUTH Subscriber:
This letter comes from the Founder and Editor in Chief. I want personally
to
tell you some very unusual facts about this unique mass-circulation magazine--
and I feel the finest and most valuable. There are some amazing facts concerning
this magazine, blazing a new trail utterly unlike any other publication.
WHY so different? WHY such high quality of editorship, such excellence in
color, typography, such worldwide coverage of important happenings, AND NO
SUBSCRIPTION PRICE and no advertising revenue? One might suppose some
very wealthy corporation with unlimited funds started and maintains it as a
philanthropic enterprise.
Yet on the contrary I myself started it without funding of any sort, and
utterly without capital. In fact there was no money. The PLAIN TRUTH was started
on a borrowed mimeograph, with stencils cut on a borrowed typewriter. There was
not then--in February 1934--any public appeal for contributions or financial
aid,
and there has been none to this day.
When I was a boy 18 years old I read a book by Orison Swett Marden
captioned He Can Who Thinks He Can. I had the gumption to believe that. The
PLAIN TRUTH, like the proverbial grain of mustard seed, started the very
smallest
and has grown to one of the earth's largest. It started on faith with diligence
and
hard work and vision. After unusual success in the commercial world, the Great
Depression had swept everything economically away. But I had found the TRUTH.
I had come to understand why in this 20th century the world is making such
awesome progress and, yet paradoxically, at the same time experiencing such
appalling and accelerating evils. I wanted to make the truth PLAIN. That's why
this magazine is called The PLAIN TRUTH.
But let me explain why this magazine is unique in refusing to charge a
subscription price. My earlier experience in the world of business (incidentally
it was in national magazines and newspapers)--kept me in constant personal
contact with the most successful chief executives of America's largest
industrial
corporations and major banks of Chicago and New York. I learned from them the
laws of success that led them to the top. I learned to view human problems from
a
practical and rational approach. But later I learned the cause of the paradox of
world troubles and unsolvable evils from the world's best-selling and least
understood book--the Bible. It gave me much new UNDERSTANDING, which I
wished to share with the many. I admit it took FAITH and perseverance, but this
most unusual magazine has after more than 50 years become one of the
largest-circulated magazines on earth, and, many believe, the most valuable and