Yes, you can find MANA’s announcement of its new president on page 105 of Billboard magazine. In all fairness, we should note that you should not search for this article in the current issue of Billboard. You’ll need to search Billboard’s back issues for the June 19, 1948 issue, when that magazine was still The Billboard. (To view that entire The Billboard article online, use the search term: “Richard A. Wilcox” MANA.)

As printed in The Billboard magazine, June 19, 1948.

Why the sudden interest in MANA’s ancient history? Because MANA’s 70th anniversary is coming up in October 2017. And while I’ve spent my first five years as MANA’s CEO looking diligently and aggressively toward MANA’s future, our upcoming 70th anniversary has reminded me to spend a little time looking at our past.

A search of our archives has revealed the first issue of The Agent and Representative magazine, dated July 1949, so this June 1948 Billboard article is the earliest reference to MANA we’ve found in print so far. If you have something older in your files, we hope you’ll share it.

We will continue to include more and more nuggets from MANA’s past as our October 2017 anniversary approaches, but for now I’d like to close this MANA editorial with an excerpt from MANA’s very first editorial, penned for that July 1949 issue by MANA’s then Executive Secretary P. Edwin Thomas.

P. Edwin Thomas

New Times, New Tasks

Rightly or wrongly, the post-war American interest is tightly linked to the welfare of half the whole world; although, even if we wished, we are not rich enough to endow the world, or powerful enough to rule it. Instead, being what we are, we can only strive to create, and work to produce, the conditions that make for freedom and peace among nations, being careful to keep ourselves solvent in the gigantic process.

But this condition, this American world interest, demands a new look at the needs of the domestic welfare of our own people, in pure terms of dollars and cents alone. For, somehow, the cost of all items, the cost of everything we need and use, must be lowered to a point within the means of each and every one of us — the means remaining after all the multifarous and multitudinous tax burdens have been borne.

Among these are the lowering of selling costs, and that is where agents and representatives come in.