The Hal Butler papers reflect the versatility, industry, and imagination of their creator's mind. Throughout his career as a writer and editor for the Ford Motor Company, Butler never ceased to follow his passion for describing his travels and telling tales of sports, mystery, and adventure. This collection will be of value to those interested in travel writing, the Great Lakes region, and publishing genres such as pulp fiction and 1950's men's magazines.
Harold Charles "Hal" Butler was a professional man of letters; over the course of his career, he was a reporter, editor, pulp fiction writer, novelist, nonfiction author, and freelance travel writer. He was born in St. Louis, MO on January 3, 1913 and in 1916 his family moved to Detroit where Butler embarked upon his career by creating 'books' of short stories as a precocious 10 year old. He was a reporter for the school paper at Detroit's Central High School and after graduation he attended night school and took correspondence courses in writing and journalism. His first job was in the correspondence department of the Detroit City Gas Company after which he worked in the purchasing department of the Ford Motor Company. From this position, he advanced himself to write for various company publications, including the employee newspaper Rouge News (which became Ford World), Ford Dealer Magazine, and the leisure and travel magazine Ford Times. Butler served as managing editor of the latter publication for ten years until his retirement in 1974.
In addition to his professional obligations at Ford, Butler wrote assiduously in a variety of genres for a great many publications. In 1991, he estimated that he had written over one hundred magazine articles and a comparable number of newspaper features. He began his freelance career writing sports and detective stories for pulp magazines, the first of which was published in 1945 in Thrilling Detective magazine. As the market for pulp fiction dwindled in the fifties, Butler turned to nonfiction writing and found outlets in popular men's magazines as well as such mainstream publications as the Saturday Evening Post and American Mercury. Through the late sixties and seventies Butler wrote twelve sports-related books for juvenile readers as well as four nonfiction works for adults. In 1981, he published an historical romance novel under the pen name "Beverly Butler." Following his retirement, Butler traveled extensively and the majority of his work from the seventies and eighties consisted of freelance travel pieces. Near the end of his career, he returned to fiction and wrote two unpublished novels, Copper Fever! and Murder in the Tropics, of which only the former survives.
Butler was married to Eleanor Elizabeth (Davis) on August 20, 1938 at Mt. Hope Congregational Church in Detroit and they lived happily together until his death. The Butlers lived in the Detroit area with their two daughters, Beverly Alice (1940-1981) and Joyce Diane (Musto) (b. 1943) and summered at their family retreat in northwestern Michigan. Hal Butler passed away on June 16, 2002 in Southfield, MI.
