A great one remembered…: CASKET AND SUNNYSIDE

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, April 1, 2003

Byline: Mark A. Newman

It would be easy to cite Casket and Sunnyside's closing after 117 years as the failure of its editors to think "outside the box." But according to a former competitor in the funeral magazine business, C&S was "stiff competition" indeed. Unfortunately, bad business decisions and indifferent owners caused the esteemed magazine's 50-year-long downward spiral.

C&S first started publishing in 1871 as The Casket and merged with a competing magazine, Sunnyside, in 1932. Shortly thereafter it started showing the first signs of rigor mortis, going from 24 to 12 issues annually.

According to Adrian Boylston, former president and publisher of American Cemetery and American Funeral Director, C&S was a fine trade magazine in its day, "but as each year passed, another head was missing." By that, thank goodness, he means staff reductions. "There was a noticeable slide in the '50s when the midwest sales rep left and started The Review." In the late '50s, C&S was part of a bankruptcy estate, and its operation was put in the hands of Nelson Buhler, a tax attorney who was an absentee owner at best. "He was not involved in the publishing world whatsoever. He just wanted to get the money out without putting any money in," Boylston observes. "The employees took advantage of the situation. It wasn't open warfare, but it was not conducive to good publishing or good business." Boylston himself tried to buy C&S on three separate occasions but could not come to agreeable terms with Buhler.

Throughout its lifetime, C&S maintained circulation in the neighborhood of 8,000. However, that all began to change when a large percentage of the readers fell out of the category and into the controlled-circulation category. Its readership got complacent and looked to the competition for information, while the ad revenue continued to plummet. Many of the ads in C&S were free, and what few paid ads there were detoured from the rate card in a big way, according to Boylston.

By the end, it was basically a one-man operation out of New York City with issues coming out late or skipped altogether. Finally, it published only seasonally. The last Casket and Sunnyside was the fall 1988 issue.

Along with C&S, other funeral services magazines that were laid to rest in the same era were Embalmer's Journal, New England Funeral Director, and Mid-Continent Morticians. They all passed quietly.