Barracuda Magazine

Barracuda was officially started as a magazine in 1961. Originally, it was intended to be the company publication for the now-defunct Barracuda Aerospace Engineering corporation based in Long Beach, California.

The job of creating the company publication was given to Marty Fox and Lefty Saeufer. Marty was a bright, young engineer who was a recent graduate of Cal Poly. He had been aggressively recruited by Barracuda Aerospace to work in their engineering department. He showed great promise as an engineer, which is why he resented being charged with a task as mundane as producing the company newsletter so much. He had been fielding offers from other aerospace firms in Seattle, so he used the newsletter to try to get himself fired and cash in on his lucrative severance package.

The two had been directed to use the publication to feature engineering issues, production reports and optimistic articles about the possibilites of the burgeoning aerospace industry.

But rather than producing a traditional corporate newsletter, the two took the money in the budget and used it to create a publication featuring nude girlie pin-ups, car repair tips and 56 pages of listings comparing booze prices at every liquor store in Los Angeles and Orange County.

Their plan worked with tremendous efficiency. As soon as the publication hit the CEO's desk, the two were fired. But they had already printed 40,000 copies of the magazine on Barracuda Aerospace's dime. Not the types to see so much work go to waste, the editors took the magazines to local newsstands, liquor stores and dog tracks, leaving big piles of them for people to take for free.

As dumb luck would have it, the two had actually hit on a very successful formula. The magazine was hugely popular. That era, after all, was the heyday of stag magazines. Barracuda became somewhat of a cult hit. When the magazine was featured on Jack Harrison's short-lived local TV show "The Stag Society," the two were deluged with fan mail and photos of Hollywood starlets who wanted to be featured in the magazine's pin-ups...