1939. Franklin D. Roosevelt was president. World War II was just getting cranked up. Tennessee's football team was going into the second of three consecutive perfect seasons. And E.W. "Ernie Peek built his version of the better mousetrap.

It was a foot ball guide, 32 pages of schedules of Southeastern Conference teams and Knoxville high school teams with pictures of coaches and captains and the preceding year's results. In round figures it was two and a half inches by four and a half inches, small enough to fit in a shirt pocket. The front cover, appropriately enough, was in orange and white, with pennants of the 13 SEC schools in the center.

Ernie Peek sold 5000 copies of his little book to Knoxville advertisers that year. Some of the names bring back memories-- B.T. Ice Company, Sanitary Laundry, Spence Shoe Company, O'-Neil's Restaurant, Knoxville Bowling Center, J.C. Mahan Motor Company, Cameron Brackney Insurance, Cockrum Lumber Company, Dixie Drive-It-Yourself, Pinkston's Jewelers.

This season, 40 years later, Ernie has sold 600,000 of his football guides to hundreds of advertisers in 16 states in the south, southwest and midwest. The Peek' Size guide--the name it has gone by for the last 34 years--is the oldest grid guide in the nation and the largest in circulation.

Ernie said he had been tinkering with football schedules as an advertising outlet for several years before the first guide book went to press.

"I first started it in the late '20s back home in Franklin, Tenn.," he said. "I printed a little card with the high school and Battle Ground Academy schedules on it and sold some advertising for it."

"I came to Knoxville in 1935 and worked at the Journal for a time, selling for its special advertising department. But I was more or less free lance, which left me with some spare time, and in '37 and '38 I sold some little fold-up cards with the UT, Knoxville High, Central High and maybe Young or Rule schedules on them. Then in '39 I decided to try the book form."

"Louis Anderson, who worked for the Knoxville Engraving Co., designed the first cover. The following year, 1940, he came up with the idea of putting some of the inside pages in color as well as the cover. We also expanded to two markets that year, opening up a Nashville branch."

By 1941 the football guide had become Ernie Peek's fulltime occupation. He had expanded circulation into 10 major cities in the southeast--Knoxville, Nashville, Chattanooga, Memphis, Birmingham, Atlanta, Montgomery, Lexington, Miami and New Orleans. In 1945 the name was changed to the now familiar Peek'Size Football Guide.

The booklet still retains its original conception of packing worlds of football information into a highly portable package, and the length and width are the same. But there have been some changes. The jacket cover has been re-designed four times. There are now 48 pages instead of 32, and a national section has been introduced, carrying the schedules of all the major teams. As with magazines, there are different issues for different parts of the country.

"In Birmingham, for instance, we'll feature Alabama and Auburn and then the rest of the SEC," says Ernie. "In Columbus, Ohio, we'll feature Ohio State and the Big Ten. Our covers will highlight the conference in that part of the country."

The original circulation scheme is still in effect, also, although it now requires a much larger staff to handle the demands. The Peek publishers sell each advertiser a certain number of copies, and the advertiser then hands them out free to his customers. But where Ernie Peek once handled the sales and distribution by himself, he now has a four person office staff in his headquarters at 712 Cumberland Ave., plus 10 sales representatives throughout the country.

Peek' Size has fought off the challenges of dozens of imitators throughout the years. "It seems that when a new one pops up, we just get stronger," says Ernie. And the little booklet has become an institution of sorts.

"We get letters from people all over the country," says Ernie. "Just recently, I had one from a lady in Nashville who wanted another copy of the football guide. Her dog had chewed up the first one. And a man from Texas wrote me saying that he had lost last year's edition, and wondered if a $5 contribution would enable him to get another."

Problems? You don't circulate 600,000 printed copies of anything without running into problems.

"I've got one on the desk in front of me," said Ernie, displaying a booklet printed for the Ann Arbor market. It had pictures of the Michigan coach and captain on the centerfold, alongside the Michigan State schedule!

"We had to print up about 12,000 more schedule pages, with gum on the back, and send them up there to paste over the original page," he said. "I'm just glad it wasn't Birmingham, where we have almost 47,000 copies in circulation, or Knoxville, which has over 40,000."

And there was the time some years back when the copies printed for the Savannah, Ga., territory turned up without any mention at all of the University of Georgia Bulldogs! The man who gave the printer the layouts had somehow committed a colossal goof.

"We had to find some new advertisers down there after that happened," said Ernie. "After all, it's pretty hard to sell a football guide in the state of Georgia if there's nothing in it about the Georgia football team. I don't remember exactly how we managed to get the new ones, but they must have been Georgia Tech fans!"