The Tonik Tapes: Jerome Rozen

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Jerome Rozen: On the corner of their building, it’s still there. Our marker is where it says Street and Smith. You look at the building and you’ll see. It’s still there. So that’s where I went. I headed there and I talked to a Mr. Hines.

Pulp Tales Announcer: During the 1970s and ’80s, longtime pulp fan, collector, and historian Albert Tonik took his cassette recorder along during interviews with Pulpsters and to Pulpcon, the precursor to PulpFest. Those recordings — the Tonik Tapes — preserved voices and memories that might otherwise have been lost. This is the first of several interviews from that collection to be featured on Pulp Tales.

Al Tonik received one of the pulp community’s highest honors, the Lamont Award in 1994. He passed away in 2018 at the age of 92. In this episode, Al talks with artist Jerome Rozen about his career in the pulp magazines, including his covers for The Shadow magazine. The interview was recorded on Sept. 27, 1983. 2026 marks the 95th anniversary of the debut of The Shadow magazine. Al’s article, “In the Shadow of Jerome Rozen,” based on this interview, is available now at thepulp.net.

Al Tonik: This is Albert Tonik on Tuesday, Sept. 27. I’m at the home of Jerome and Doris Rozen.

Doris Rozen: I have to just put them through those paces. I don’t know how many times.

Al Tonik: Oh, who’s done this?

Doris Rozen: Oh, sure. Yeah.

Al Tonik: You’ve been written about before?

Jerome Rozen: Yeah, I’ve had a few.

Al Tonik: Oh, gosh. How would you like to be written about for the pulp magazines?

Jerome Rozen: It doesn’t make a difference to me.

Al Tonik: All right. When were you born, Jerome?

Jerome Rozen: Three o’clock this morning.

Doris Helen?: You started like that.

Jerome Rozen: I was born in 1895, believe it or not.

Al Tonik: Where?

Jerome Rozen: In Chicago.

Al Tonik: In Chicago. Okay. And you were identical twin with?

Jerome Rozen: George.

Al Tonik: George.

Jerome Rozen: His name was George Jerome and mine is Jerome George. Okay. To make it sticky.

Doris Helen?: Make it sticky. Yeah.

Al Tonik: What art school did you go to?

Jerome Rozen: Art Institute of Chicago at the end, and then I taught before. You taught at the Institute of Chicago? Yeah, Chicago, yeah. Mm-hmm. Before that, you know how art is. Everybody shows you something and you grab it. But a man by the name of Swinnerton, I think, was the one that we got us going. Swinnerton? James Swinnerton.

Al Tonik: I’ve seen that name before.

Jerome Rozen: – You saw it in the newspaper. You used to have a little Jimmy?

Al Tonik: – Yes.

Jerome Rozen: – Well, he lived in Flag, too, in the Weatherford Hotel. And we got acquainted with him. And he used to go out sketching, did he? And he was very interested. He introduced us to a new paint color that I hadn’t ever seen before. It’s called Maratta. And I’ve tried to buy it since he’s been working, I mean, another field. And you can’t buy it anymore. But there was a colorway. It gave you all kinds of gradients and things. It was very handy, and we liked it. So I used that in Great Glyph of Marathe.

Al Tonik: Did you and George both start in commercial work at the same time?

Jerome Rozen: Well, it went like this. George was a manager of the Western Union in Flagstaff. They had a repeater station. and he was working on that. And then he gave that up. And I’m not sure what, when the army came along, he went to the army a little after I had gone into it. And I went to France and he stayed in somewhere in Michigan, I think it was. And that was what started that. And I went to our school then. He got the idea when he got out of that thing, to come over and try the same stunt that I was doing, studying art. So he went to the Art Institute about a year after I was there. He started in there.

Al Tonik: Didn’t one of you go to an art school in Philadelphia or New York? Walter Baumhofer said that he was in the same class with one of you.

Jerome Rozen: Yeah, I think that (Walter) Baumhofer must have been George. Oh, okay. What school could that have been? George did a lot of things. He snooped around a lot.

Al Tonik: I don’t remember now, but Baumhofer mentioned that he was in the same class.

Jerome Rozen: Baumhofer, you may know.

Al Tonik: Baumhofer, yeah.

Jerome Rozen: Then I studied sculpting a little bit in a knife under a man of sculpture. I still have a chromo upstairs.

Doris Helen?: Where do you sculpt it, you know?

Jerome Rozen: With clay, you know, make it with clay, and then you cast it and put it in the knife.

Doris Helen?: Their horse, you make it up.

Jerome Rozen: Not the horse, but the man.

Doris Helen?: Or the man.

Jerome Rozen: Yeah, the man on the shovel, only on the shovel. Well anyway, that was, maybe that was the spoon you’re thinking of, but that wasn’t much of a spoon. No, no.

Al Tonik: You said that you were in France during World War I. I was, yes, I was in France during World War I. Were you a soldier in the trenches or?

Jerome Rozen: I was in trenches all right, but never up at the front. But I was on my way up there. I was up at Langres, France. They pulled me out and went to the officers’ training school. They pulled me out for the officers’ training school at Langres. And when I was up there, my outfit was pulled and broken up and sent up to the front, and they got badly shot up. I lost a very different friend, Martin Moore. He was from Flagstaff. And some others, too, chewed up pretty badly. And, well, that took care of the Army. Then I got out of that, I went back to Bordeaux. I stayed there for a little while until we were ready to sail back to America. Then I was taken back on a warship instead of an old freighter. He was one of my own freighters. So that’s—

Al Tonik: When were you in Flagstaff? You said you were born in Chicago and you went to art school in Chicago.

Jerome Rozen: Yeah.

Al Tonik: When were you in Flagstaff?

Jerome Rozen: Back and forward. There were so many trips backward and forward. But the first trip to Flagstaff was sometime—I was born in Chicago about, oh, I don’t know, maybe four or five years old. I wouldn’t know what age that was. But it was very early in life. And it didn’t stay there very long. I had a brother and he, they thought that would help his health and that he passed away. And then we also went back to Chicago. But that hooked us in to Flagstaff. So we went back to Flag later on. And then back, went forward. That’s the whole trips back and forward. That’s what it amounted to. – Okay, when did you move to New York? – Well, that’s gonna be hard because it’s more recent. And I can’t remember that as well as I can, some of the other.

Al Tonik: – Yes, I understand.

Jerome Rozen: – Well, let’s see if I can tell. Well, after, well, it must have been about 1920 or somewhere in ’22, somewhere, I don’t know. – Okay. – Somewhere in there. At that time, I gave up the teaching and all the stuff I’d been doing there. I married. That was a case in the first marriage. I’m sorry to say I don’t move the date of it. Right, okay. That’s it. And then we got in an apartment in New York.

Al Tonik: And you started working for Boy’s Life then?

Jerome Rozen: Yeah, that’s about the time that I hooked in Boy’s Life.

Al Tonik: Were you doing interior illustrations or cover illustrations?

Jerome Rozen: I did both. Both. But most of them were a very straight illustration. They would send me a serial, you know, continuation. And I’d take it with me. And even when I traveled to Goodview, which I did to Arizona and so on and so forth, I carried that with me and made illustrations in Chicago and Arizona and send them in, see? And that’s the way that went for years.

Doris Helen?: – It’s my wife thing too, did you know?

Jerome Rozen: – Yeah, my wife.

Doris Helen?: – Yeah, the first wife.

Jerome Rozen: – Yeah, she was in school. That’s where I met her. Yeah, I didn’t see her in Chicago school. That was the Chicago.

Doris Helen?: Yeah, Chicago. Yeah, you’re totally…

Jerome Rozen: Well, you still want to know.

Al Tonik: That doesn’t bring us up to date, does it? No, it’s not up to date yet. And how did you get to go to Street & Smith? Did you… It was just two legs.

Jerome Rozen: I mean, how did you hear about it? Did you see it all? I looked around in magazines, what was being done, you know. But I had an idea maybe it might be more girl.

Al Tonik: Okay, you just saw it on the newsstands. No one recommended it.

Jerome Rozen: No, on the corner of their building, it’s still there. Our marker is where it says Street and Smith. You look at the building and you’ll see. It’s still there. So that’s where I went. I headed there and I talked to a Mr. Hines. Hines? Yeah, Dick Hines. No, not Dick. This is a different one. What is Pop Hines’ first name? Do you know that?

Doris Rozen: No.

Jerome Rozen: I can’t remember what his first name, but his name was Hines anyway. And he was very good to me. He gave me his job doing it clever. And that started me off in another way. It was like H-I-N-E-S. You know? Doris got to know him a little better than I did. How do you spell Hines?

Doris Rozen: Yeah.

Jerome Rozen: Okay. I think that’s probably pretty close.

Doris Rozen: I think so.

Jerome Rozen: I went to see him in the hospital, I know. And they had something on it. That wouldn’t give me the name. and then he got in the hospital and passed away.

Al Tonik: So your first job for Street Smith was a cover?

Jerome Rozen: That cover, that’s right.

Al Tonik: Do you remember what magazine it was for? No. Okay. But then you did do some of the early shadow covers. Yes, I did.

Jerome Rozen: I think they got me down for three. Yeah, they had written three.

Al Tonik: You did the ones with the hooded shadow?

Jerome Rozen: No, that hadn’t developed into that yet. Oh. they’re in the book I can’t remember what they were

Al Tonik: I’ll look them up

Jerome Rozen: but anyway I think there were three Anthony picked up one it had to do with a fire or something alright but let’s see where I go in that time I was doing a lot of searching around went to different magazines and I got hooked up with a Red Book magazine they got a lot of illustrations even before your accident? – Well, let me see, was that before or was that after? No, that must have been a little after. No, ’cause when I cracked up, I was out for about a long time. – Were you driving the car or? – I was driving in and a big bus came, and Dad had him back, and it smacked into me. My wife was in the car sitting next to me, and she, now she was, she died. And I was in the hospital for months. – Months? – Oh yeah, months, regularly, I got the works that time, but I pulled too. She didn’t. And then the windlass took me from there. Then I went back to the studio. I was paying rent in there all that time. I couldn’t let go of the things were in there. And John Howitt was in the front room in that building, and he had a big studio there too. And then Les Thrasher took over another studio. You know, he did Liberty Covers. He went right next to me. So there was Howitt and another man, a photographer by the name of Marsh and myself. Who were on the floor.

Doris Rozen: Yeah, and Chester was on that floor.

Jerome Rozen: Chester came in later. See, he took over Howitt’s studio later. Howitt pulled out of it and Chester went in there. And Howitt moved into the back studio, which was mine, which was the little one. And then when Leslie Thrasher pulled out, he, He, in fact, he was Ken. I think he was. Then I moved into his studio. That was the big middle studio. That’s where I stayed, most of my- Did you say his name was Thrasher? Thrasher, Leslie Thrasher. Okay. Well, you know his cover, I’m sure you know him. I know, yeah. The Liberty Magazine, and he did a lot of other things. Okay. When did you meet Doris? Now, that, Doris from Gronair, where did I meet you? – Sure. There’s so much in between and you don’t think

Doris Rozen: there’s three in or not.

Jerome Rozen: – Okay.

Doris Rozen: – And so we got to know each other. And then I was just– – At Paswell. – Yeah.

Jerome Rozen: – Paswell was the one that was in the industry.

Doris Rozen: – And I got a book to illustrate. And I didn’t have a studio at the time, so Jerome invited me to use these studios. So I did. We had fun. Yeah, we formed a very nice little group there, because there was another artist in the building next door, and—

Jerome Rozen: Larry Wilbert. I mean, Norman? No. We didn’t bring on that set. And then there was a photographer downstairs by the name of Marsh.

Doris Rozen: Yeah. So, it was a nice little group. We had lots of fun.

Al Tonik: Yeah.

Doris Rozen: And we had nice parties. Everything was really all that. I knew, well, 10 years before we were married. And we’ve only been married for 32 years.

Al Tonik: – It seems like a whole 32.

Jerome Rozen: – It seems like a century.

Doris Rozen: – Yeah, like a what?

Jerome Rozen: – A century, that’s all right. You wouldn’t know what that means, a century. But anyway, that’s where the story piles up. Then we married. And in the meantime, you moved out here with me, Mitch. And that’s it. And then on we-

Doris Rozen: – And here we are.

Jerome Rozen: – And here we are still. They did a lot of traveling. We went to all the coasts. How many trips do you make to Arizona and all that? I bought some land out there and they thought we were doing something with it. We still have it. – Oh. – And it’s gone up in value pretty well.

Doris Rozen: Very well as the land. – Yeah, but what, you see, George and Ellen had a beautiful home in Long Island. They sold and they went out west. See, Jerome’s family was out there.

Al Tonik: Yes, reflected.

Doris Rozen: Right on down in Saddam. But unfortunately, his wife developed cancer. We had all the plans made, Jerome’s son, in a beautiful house, in a group studio. They had fun in this gorgeous brown forest. They had—they bought some from Cleveland. I had never been to Arizona, and George had been out there, and he came to the studio one day, and he had a bunch of pictures that we took out there. Oh, I was just carried away. I was fancy. So we got out there. Well, they showed us the ground they bought, and Jerome saw how keynote was better. He brought some grass and they were going to build studios together. It’s a beautiful piece of ground. And we went frozen there. We brought some up above that they climbed up in Flagstaff. But when his wife passed very hard.

Jerome Rozen: Things fell apart, yeah. Sure, they usually do. I know, yeah.

Doris Rozen: Yeah, well, there we are.

Jerome Rozen: Kind of hard to recover from that. Yeah, it kind of hard. And since then I’ve been doing what?

Doris Helen?: Beautiful.

Jerome Rozen: Did you ever go back and do any more pulp work? Gee, did I. I’ve been doing some more. I’m doing pulp work now.

Al Tonik: Yes, you’re doing pulp work now.

Jerome Rozen: No, nothing for the pulp work. I think I’ll do my career though. I hooked up with another concern called Carl Pers– – Cloud? – Car-l. – Oh, Car-l. – Car-l person.

Doris Rozen: – C-A-L-L.

Jerome Rozen: – And they put in, among other things, I kept all these things going. And they had a window display and that sort of thing. And I hooked into a count called–

Doris Rozen: – Yeah. – Well, you’re talking about the thing of the Mail Pouch?

Jerome Rozen: – Mail Pouch. It was chewing tobacco. – Yes. – Yes, I remember. – I made all those things for over 15 years. I made all those things. – In fact, Claire has a lot of the copies. He’s got them over there in Ohio.

Doris Rozen: – That’s one of the-

Jerome Rozen: – There were tons of them.

Doris Rozen: I don’t know how many times- – A rough sketch for one of the paintings,

Jerome Rozen: the center one. – Yes. I made him a preliminary, gave him an idea of what was, how the thing was gonna work out for what the materials they had. And then I’d paint them up and there was three pictures that came out as a triptych. You understand, three, one center and then two smaller ones. and triptychs. And that made the window display. And I went down and then later on, Carl Percy died. The Lighthawk, I think, passed away first, didn’t he? He was the art director. He was a co-pilotner, by the way. And then finally, Carl Percy passed away. Percy passed before Carl, before Lighthawk. I remember that. But anyway, that’s, I fell out to a lot of books that they had they wanted me to have them, and I took them. They filmed the car.

Doris Rozen: – Well, I know. But after that, you were going to advertise it.

Jerome Rozen: – Yeah, I got in advertising, but Al Paul Lefton gave me the big start, although I worked for good many of the agencies.

Doris Rozen: – Al Paul Lefton did so, don’t.

Jerome Rozen: – They had the Panarello, what I mentioned about it. But they used to drive me crazy with the amount of work they’d throw at me. They’d give me one job, and before I got it down there, They’d send a man after it and they’d be shooting another one to me. They kept me going and they couldn’t make up their mind on some of those accounts. They didn’t know what they wanted to do. But we got along. I got money out of it and I think they were happy as the whole thing went through.

Doris Rozen: Yeah, then after that you do a lot of other things for Baker.

Jerome Rozen: Yeah, well then I got in tied up with a man by the name of George Baker. I won’t even know more about this than I do. – He ran, what would you call that thing?

Doris Rozen: – Well, yeah, big, well,

Jerome Rozen: – Yeah, big plant.

Doris Rozen: – Now it’s representative.

Jerome Rozen: – Yeah, I guess you’d call him that. The other place up in the Graybar Building.

Doris Rozen: – Yeah, in this place.

Jerome Rozen: – He called on me. – Great Bar. – Yeah, and then I got to doing Schlitz beer for a long while, oh, I don’t know, everything. And then I got in with a lot of these gasoline things, like the, what is it, Sheil? – Shell. – Shell. – Oh, I did a terrific one. – Billboard. – Billboard Stub 24. – Oh, they saw them. – Yes. – Oh, sure, they were all over the country, they were national. So that’s because the things that fall, but now the little things in between, now you nibble in and do them. I wouldn’t know, but that pretty nearly sums it up. There’s some big ones that kept me pushed.

Al Tonik: – That’s right, most of the advertising was really art rather than photographs. – That’s right. – Most days.

Doris Rozen: – And then, well, it was-

Jerome Rozen: photographs were secondary. If I had to touch photographs, your name was in red. That’s an actual fact. But that changed after one. That changed. Now it’s all photographs. All photographs. They had color film came in, which wasn’t in vogue at the other time.

Doris Rozen: There were a lot of different things. Well, photography took out a reading for a magazine

Jerome Rozen: – Well, that’s what it wrote, I guess.

Doris Rozen: – Oh, that’s a charge.

Jerome Rozen: – I had a man that, well, I had several men that did the photography for me that I needed after a while. Don Sochow, he’s pretty well known. He used to be up on 42nd Street, then later on he moved up. – Well, that’s where I thought

Doris Rozen: you might have seen Baumhofer.

Jerome Rozen: – I may have, Doris, I can’t be sure. And I saw him there and I went, what was the other fellow, the one I had on Chicago? – I think that’s where I last saw Boney.

Doris Rozen: – Yeah, Jerome’s had quite a checkered grip.

Jerome Rozen: – Well, that’d been wrong in life.

Doris Rozen: – Did he tell you when he started the paint? Well, I mean, when he went to Chicago Art Institute after the war.

Jerome Rozen: – Right.

Doris Rozen: – Yeah.

Jerome Rozen: – Yeah, I didn’t have any treatment.

Doris Rozen: – Nothing flat he was teaching there.

Jerome Rozen: Yes, he mentioned that. I should teach myself a few things, how to make shadow heads.

Doris Rozen: Me, I go to that. I didn’t study anything.

Jerome Rozen: That’s the ocean. That was when he went to California, couldn’t he?

Doris Rozen: Yeah, Jerome did that.

Jerome Rozen: In California.

Doris Rozen: No, Jerome didn’t do it from life, did he?

Jerome Rozen: I made some sketches, rough sketches. I made this here more recently.

Doris Rozen: Yeah, quite recently.

Al Tonik: I have the sketches. Have you done any commercial work recently? That thing is dead. It is for me anyway. For the last 20 years you really haven’t done any real work then?

Jerome Rozen: No, except pups and their work. There’s men with the grown kind of a chin and nose and stuff and and you gotta work on them. And you’re guilty now. – I am guilty, yes. – No, no kidding, Morrison. Glad to do it. Well, anyway, that’s pretty near the way the thing runs. – You finally closed up in 1964?

Al Tonik: – I think you said before.

Jerome Rozen: – I think that was, yeah, I knew as I can place it. I gave up the studio at 163, it was 23rd. I had a nice studio in there with Ben Hitch.

Doris Rozen: – Yeah, it was a good studio. It had two sky.

Jerome Rozen: – And two sky. – It was all the studio. – What’s the other one?

Doris Rozen: – How big was that studio, Jerome?

Jerome Rozen: – I think that measure was something like 45 feet long. And it was a 25 foot lot and lot, so it was about 20 feet wide.

Doris Rozen: – And look where Jerome’s painting now, would you believe me?

Jerome Rozen: – The garage.

Doris Rozen: – Oh, that light drives me insane.

Jerome Rozen: – That light was, it was worse this year than it was last year because the trees grew bigger. and the greens cutting and then the greens does change its color. That makes it hard. You don’t know what you’re getting. In the morning, if the sun comes up, I have to wait till the sun passes enough so it doesn’t come in the window. When by that time, then the trees start working on me. And then they had all these greens coming down and blocking out the light for me. I couldn’t see. And you know when you’re not washing Helen, it helped because it didn’t really like to reflect the back end. But then every time that changed, I can’t change the picture that much, see? It makes it kinda hard. I have to kinda guess what’s gonna happen.

Doris Helen?: – I’m gonna hang up close every day. – Wait, hold on.

Jerome Rozen: – That’s an idea. Maybe I should put out a big white sheet there.

Doris Helen?: – Yeah, I told you, if you had one,

Jerome Rozen: put it in one day every day. – In the meantime, we bought this house and that’s been here ever since. We’ve been in this house ever since.

Doris Rozen: – No, John bought this house way back then.

Jerome Rozen: – Yeah, that was in ’32. Billy was two years old at that time.

Al Tonik: You lived here and went to work in New York City?

Jerome Rozen: Yeah, I worked on a bus and then whatever I needed.

Doris Rozen: Well, it’s very convenient.

Jerome Rozen: It was handy for me then. I think now would be a pain in the neck.

Doris Rozen: Oh, wow. That’s two of George’s paintings back there, isn’t it?

Jerome Rozen: Yeah, those are the two little ones. He used to do little landscape stuff. The one that’s taken down in Sedona. We owned a ranch down there. That was it.

Doris Rozen: You know, that thing is getting murky, aren’t I?

Jerome Rozen: That little one below there is Oak Creek. And that’s– George stayed with the pulps, didn’t he? He did, primarily, yes. George stayed with the pulps pretty well. Well, I like that.

Doris Rozen: George did.

Jerome Rozen: Yeah. That is called– that’s Oak Creek coming down there. Boy, right today. Oh, this is in Arizona.

Doris Rozen: Yeah. Oh, it’s a beautiful place. Yeah, you can’t tell on this stuff. Yeah.

Al Tonik: I was looking well, this fellow John Howitt, he stayed with the pulps, as I recall.

Jerome Rozen: Well, you know, he didn’t want to. Oh, this is between you and me and the gatepost. He did them because, well, it was a means of acting a lot of it. John didn’t fare too well financially.

Doris Rozen: Well, didn’t John paint some poems?

Jerome Rozen: He painted more than I thought because a book came out later, and they all have John’s name on it.

Doris Rozen: And I had no idea. I never saw anything with it.

Jerome Rozen: Well, you know what? That was funny. He figured, I’m sure this film, I knew John so well. I knew him as—he knew me too, just the same way. But he figured if you were no one familiar doing pulps, you’d never get any more work. And the funny thing was, that’s right. Oh, really? You’re not kidding. That was a bad name if you did pulps, huh? Well, it labeled you in a different class. Yes. It was called Lowdown. If you want to know what I mean by expression, you’re not going to slow it down, but I mean it’s… I understand. He was shooting for the higher-ups. Sure. He’d like to have done portraiture and big paintings and stuff, and of course he couldn’t always get that.

Doris Rozen: That’s fair. You know, well, didn’t they look down on illustrators?

Jerome Rozen: Oh, I think they did. I was doing a lot of illustrating, a lot of these here. God is thanks to Terrell’s stories. A whole flock of them flew at me. They were all serials. I mean six or seven months, maybe eight, nine months for one story, you know, and you get the characters in development and all that sort of thing. – Who was this author? – Gladys Hasty Carroll. Then they gave her a big dinner. – Where did she write? – She was up in Maine. – I mean, what magazines? – Red Book mostly that I know of. I don’t know if she’s been in others I know of, but mostly Red Book magazine at that time. And they suggested I go up there and look when they gave me the discernment and look the ground over and see what was there that might be usable, which I did do. Della, that was my first wife, and I went up there and we, we went, we combed it over pretty well. We met Gladys Hasty Carroll. She was living up there at that time. We sort of showed us around and gave us a good, good rundown on what was going on up there, which helped a lot. She had other stories she might have heard, I got a straight-up show with him for the Red Book, by the way.

Doris Rozen: Now, a book illustrator, general, you know, book, any illustrator, they really, especially in the magazine, all The Saturday Evening Post, I remember the fun they poked at him.

Jerome Rozen: Yeah, that’s the way it was. Well, anyway, John, I knew his possession. I knew his trouble and everything about that man. I was very close to him.

Doris Rozen: Well, times changed. changed, and manners changed, and wars.

Jerome Rozen: I also worked, did some pumps for another outfit. Was it Dell Publishing? It was Dell, yes. Well, I guess I hit most of the magazines. I did some one or two maybe, you know? But that was in the beginning. I worked, I did some for Dell. I don’t remember how many of them. Steeger was then. Steeger was connected with a different magazine or group at that.

Al Tonik: Yeah, he was an editor or something.

Jerome Rozen: Yeah, that’s right. He was in a different location, too.

Al Tonik: It wasn’t Macfadden —it might have been Dell. I don’t remember.

Jerome Rozen: Dell came in later.

Al Tonik: Oh.

Jerome Rozen: He was with something else before that. I got another—

Al Tonik: And then in about 1931 or something, he went and formed his own company. He formed the Dell. Well, well, Popular Publications.

Jerome Rozen: Excuse me. Yeah. Popular publication. He formed that, yeah. Yeah. It might have been Macfadden that he worked for. I don’t remember. No, no. He had no country Macfadden that I know of because a lot of in between, you know, you never know how that stuff is handled. It all went on. I don’t think he was over to Macfadden.

Al Tonik: But he was an editor for an aviation book, something like Warbirds or something, and Steeger was.

Jerome Rozen: I don’t know what he was for. I did a job for him on something. And then when they went to the Dell, they finally contacted me again. And I got in a few. I used to do a few of them for them, not very often. beginning later on between the Mail Pouch, which gave me these 15 pictures a year was enough. There’s quite a little. And then what other stuff I could pick up on the outside, that’s what kept me going. It was fun. When I look back at it, I think now I could cuss at the car badly that time, but now-

Doris Rozen: it’s all over. It’s all over. Sure, well, the sting is out.

Jerome Rozen: Yeah, they were in the same kind of a sting there was before.

Doris Rozen: There wasn’t that pressure.

Jerome Rozen: Well, it was competition. It was kind of a stimulus too. Yeah. Doing it for you. You could stimulate me.

Doris Rozen: Well, then Jerome was working for J. Walter Thompson.

Jerome Rozen: I did him up a lot of stuff at Thompson.

Doris Rozen: And they’d give you a due date in one day.

Jerome Rozen: That was left in your thinking of it.

Doris Rozen: No, I’m thinking of Thompson.

Jerome Rozen: Oh, they did it too.

Doris Rozen: And they told him all about it, and he said, "Yeah, what’s the date? When is the two?" And it was before the date they were giving me.

Jerome Rozen: Yeah, they had it chalked up for a date before they were giving me the job. It was chalked up at that schedule. Come, I didn’t think I could do it.

Doris Rozen: You know what I’m saying? I think we knew this would happen to me sometime, or it did.

Jerome Rozen: But I think the one that really ran me ragged was Al Paul Lefton. That real one thing. I saved some of those letters and I read one over here about a couple months ago. And I tell you, it made me laugh to see how they could handle this. They’d do a job and the man was on their way down. They had a culling man. He’d go down, he’d barely get down, he’d come back with something else. It was this thing, you know? And it kept me running. They’d run me ragged. And then they had a big picture. they’re going to have one for the Penn Station do it. I think it went up, too. I never got to see it, but it went up. It was a series of heads.

Pulp Tales Announcer: And that’s where the cassette tape ran out, right in the middle of Jerome Rozen’s story about a mural for Penn Station. The rest of that story and the rest of Al’s interview is lost to us. Al’s article, In the Shadow of Jerome Rozen, is available at thepulp.net. Thank you for listening, and keep reading the pulps.

Pulp Tales is copyright 2026 by William P. Lampkin.

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain transcription errors, typos, or other inaccuracies.