mcminnville tn and soldier of fortune magazine

Mcminnville tn and soldier of fortune magazine manuals#

Sonny was considerably older than I, but Rose was only five years my senior, yet Jane and I had so much fun with them and always enjoyed their company. Sonny was droll, quiet, yet had a low key sense of humor, while Rose had a sparkling personality with a great deal of genuine laughter.

Those were very festive occasions in which Rose, a marvelous gourmet cook, served delicious food and Sonny manned an impressive bar which was always well stocked with Old Robertson Scotch Whisky, his namesake he always said laughingly.Īs a couple, Sonny and Rose Robertson had very different personalities but they complemented one another. Sonny and Rose reciprocated, of course, by giving many beautiful dinner parties at Glen Echo. The Robertsons were frequent guests at the parties our friends and we gave which included the Beasleys, the Harlins, the Sewells, the Hutchesons, the Campbells, the Billingtons, the Sam Ewins, the J.C.

Shumacher lived in the home and while there installed an elevator to make it easier to get to his bedroom upstairs. It had belonged to a well known Nashville photographer named Shumacher and a friend of his named Anthony. In 1958, Sonny and Rose bought an historic old home on Spencer Creek Road named Glen Echo which contained 263 acres. Not long after the War’s end, Sonny and Rose’s family had grown to five: they had three sons, Edward Averill III, James Anthony, and Charles McKenzie. Not long after the Pearl Harbor disaster on December 7, 1941, Sonny went into the U.S. Sonny was several years older than Rose, but they started dating, and in 1941 they married. Rose was from Henning, TN, a small town in West Tennessee near Ripley. Sonny, a very successful insurance executive, grew up in Nashville and met Rose while she was a student at Vanderbilt University. We met them through Padge and Charlotte Beasley and Hutch and Elizabeth Hutcheson, and we soon became close friends. “We want to keep the brand going so we are transitioning entirely to the internet.” He added: “After we went to press with the last issue, it was like a humongous rock lifted off my back that I had been unaware of until it was removed.Jane and I first became acquainted with Sonny and Rose in the early 1960’s. “We couldn’t cut a deal to sell just the print edition,” Brown told the WSJ. The WSJ partly attributes the decline in readership to the aging Vietnam Veteran population. In April 2016, the magazine will fold its print edition, but will continue producing content for its website,, according to The Wall Street Journal. The magazine’s readership has dwindled significantly since its Reagan-era heyday. The families of several people allegedly killed by Soldier of Fortune hitmen famously sued the magazine in the mid-80s.

Mcminnville tn and soldier of fortune magazine manuals#

At the time, the magazine was notorious for its classifieds section, which advertised everything from tactical manuals and weaponry, to real-life guns for hire. Soldier of Fortune’s readership reached its peak in the 1980s, when it had a print circulation of about 150,000. Six correspondents have been killed while on assignment for Soldier of Fortune in places like Burma, Angola, Nicaragua, and Sierra Leone, according to Maxim. “We would create the story, gin up a lot of action, and then write about it for the glistening pages of our bad-boy magazine,” Brown explained in his 2013 memoir, “I Am Soldier of Fortune: Dancing with Devils.” Related: Vets Who Want To Fight ISIS Can Learn From Old Fights In The African Bush » But it wouldn’t be the last time the scrappy Michigan-native saw combat.Īs the editor of Soldier of Fortune, Brown traveled the globe pursuing what he appropriately dubbed “hardcore participatory journalism,” which often placed him and the freelance writers he employed (usually actual mercenaries) at the chaotic center of the stories they covered. “We said our blood was just as red as anyone who fought in WWI or WWII or Korea, but that wasn’t the case in society at the time.”īrown, who retired from the Army as a lieutenant colonel, was wounded in a mortar attack while serving with Special Forces in the central highlands of Vietnam in 1969. “A lot of Vietnam veterans felt they weren’t given their due, so I wanted to promote the concept of giving them recognition,” Brown, 83, told Maxim in a recent interview. Brown founded Soldier of Fortune in 1975, he had one very specific audience in mind: G.I.s who had returned from Vietnam only to realize that they felt more at home on the battlefield than they did in a society that widely shunned the war they represented.