Here is a 1948 recipe booklet from This Week Magazine Service.
“Take our breakfast menu. We got kippers, lamb kidneys, shrimp omelets, eirkucken, barley porridge, guava jelly, an’ Darjeeling tea. Also we got ham an’ eggs an’ toast an’ coffee. We just put that other stuff on for variety. People like to read through quite a list of things before the order their ham an’
“Same at lunch. We list various pottages, bisques an’ broths. Then we got a choice of vegetable or bean soup. In ten years we had one order for bisque of crayfish, but I left it off the printed menu only one day an’ six regular customers hollered. When I called their bluff they picked vegetable instead.
“Com dinner, you can be “out” of crab legs, sweetbreads, escalloped veal an’ forty other things. Better not be out of port chops, pot roast, hamburgers or stew.
“So i suggest you past this cookbook in the front of your other one. That way you won’t have to turn through the big book to find what papa an’ the kids are going’ to get–an’ really like–for the next meal, an’ the next, an’ the next!”
–Wally Boren
What was Wally’s Wagon? A restaurant? I did an internet search. Nope, Wally was a fictional character or persona invented by Wally Boren. He kept his identity (or identities) secretive.
A 1943 Time magazine article mentions Wally Boren.
Dear Friend: Have You Got PERSONAL PROBLEMS That Are Worrying You? Have World-Wide Sin, Violence and Depression upset YOUR life as they have so many, many others? For example: Are You in Poor Health? Are You Worried About Money Troubles or Debts? , . .
Have You Got Love or Family Troubles? From a 187-year-old, cream-colored Colonial house called “Dutch Oven” (it was once a tearoom by that name) at Noroton, Conn., went out hundreds of copies of this letter last week. The printed signature: “Your Sincere Friends in LIFE-STUDY FELLOWSHIP”—a nonsectarian organization which has no church, no groups of people meeting together any where, but which dispenses its philosophy (“the practical application of Christian principles to the problems of modern living . . .”) solely through the mail.
Priest, Angel, and 25 Clerks. The Fellowship’s high priest is a shy, amiable, 33-year-old ex-advertising man, Lyman P. Wood, son-in-law of the World’s Christian Endeavor Union’s famed head, Dan Poling. Right-hand man and financial angel is another advertising man, Wallace R. Boren, 43-year-old author of “Wally’s Wagon,” a homespun philosophy column syndicated in 21 U.S. papers. Wood puts in full time with some 25 women clerical helpers; Boren does his stint evenings and weekends. Both are entirely sincere.
Wood and Boren, who met when they worked in the same Manhattan advertising office, started the Life-Study Fellowship in 1939. Neither of them regular church goers, they tackled the project at first just as a spare-time avocation and bit of advertising research, to see how large a response they could get by using mailing lists. From mailing-list brokers they bought 100,000 names, circularized them, got between five and six thousand replies.
Today they have 100,000 names enrolled.
These people buy Faith, a quarterly 16-page magazine printed in purple ink (“There is no subscription price . . . send a contribution once in a while”), the New Way Prayers (10¢ each), the Life-Study Fellowship Lessons (25¢ each or five for $1). Two-thirds of the buyers are women, many elderly, most of them in low-income brackets.
$ 15,000 Postage. The Fellowship’s running expenses come to about $100,000 annually. Postage alone costs $15,000.
For three years Boren has taken care of the deficit; this year it looks as if they will just about break even.
Faith (“a message of courage and good cheer”) contains daily prayers, plenty of testimonials from members who have got out of debt, staved off illness, found happiness in a once-sordid world.
The New Way Prayers are mimeographed on white, pink, yellow and blue paper. Subjects: Success in Overcoming Money Troubles and Debts; Happiness in Marriage; That Other People Will Stop Being Mean and Unjust To Me.
Wood has written most of these 300-odd orisons. Financial prayers sell best (“Teach me, above all, dear Lord, to live within my means”). Prayers for good health and plenty of friends run next in popularity.
The Lessons are five-page mimeographed sheets “written with deep human understanding and true spiritual faith . . . [to] show you . . . just how to attack the problems you may be facing.” Some of the 24 topics: How You Can Get A Job; How You Can Make Your Husband (Wife) Love And Respect You More.
How You Can Have Better Health includes such advice as: “Eat enough, but do not overeat. Don’t stuff yourself until you can barely swallow. . . . Start the day with a brimming glass of water—’a toast to God.’ … It is very healthful to sleep naked in a clean bed. . . . Keep on your side of the bed and do not disturb your partner any more than you can help.”
Wood is now working on a book, With God All Things Are Possible.
https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/printout/0,8816,802985,00.html
The New York Times ran Boren’s obituary on September 20, 1963. It said that he started his magazine column in This Week Magazine in 1923 and it ran until a few years previous to his death. Boren was director of the J. Walter Thomson advertising agency. He died of a stroke in his Menlo Park home. Boren married Blanche Elizabeth Pollard and they had three children: Elaine Dodge, Jeanne Caldwell, and Elton.
This Week Magazine was a supplement in newspapers and was the oldest and once the most widely spread newspaper magazine supplement.
A 1945 article told that a bomber was named for Wally’s Wagon but shortly later it was reported that the bomber had been shot down.
A 1946 article talks about a real Wally chief, in Indianapolis unlike the fictional Wally in the syndicated column with his “homespun philosophy.”
Boren’s daughter Jeanne married a Detroit native, Willis Caldwell, and they lived in Farmington Hills, MI.
I can find no photo of Wallace Raymond Boren! Not with obituaries or on Find A Grave or Ancestry.com. We are left with chief Wally as our only image.
The Literate Quilter 