April-May 2024 Highlights
Scroll down or click on the buttons above for more content on this website.
Scroll down or click on the buttons above for more content on this website.
Fond Farewells
Alex Taylor III, 79;
Gerald Levin, 84
Click on Farewells above
to find more information
•
Ambassador FlorCruz (scroll down)
The Death of a Name--posted 7/14/2021
Life Magazine and The Power of Photography--posted 2/6/2021
Magazine Photography Exhibits Reviewed --posted 7/18/2021
"The Eagle has Landed" and The Drive to Woodstock --Posted 7/22/19
• • •
Click on the buttons above to go to these pages of this newsletter.
"What's News"
Alumni Get Together in Sydney
Jumping Into a Nazi Prison
Remembering a unique and all but forgotten Timeincer by Jeremy Main
HEALTH CARE UPDATE NOTICE
Name Change but No Services Change --Posted 4/4/23
Enthusiasm Down Under—posted 9/17/2022
Waber’s Crocodile On Film —posted 6/29/2022
The magazine business: from the coolest placeto the coldest —posted 5/18/2022
Before it was possible? by Bob Gomel —posted 5/18/2022
The Stolley Memorial
With as much laughter as tears, some 125 guests, mostly Time Life alumni, gathered. . .—posted 3/11/2022
Fortune and the Theranos Scandal—posted 2/14/2022
TIME Alumni Greetings from Down-Under —posted 12/30/2021
From high-tech to bagels, Mitch Klaif, a former senior vice president at Time Inc.,
and his wife, Diane, will open a bagel shop in New Milford, Connecticut —posted 10/24/2021
•
Where The Time & Life Building Was Born—posted 5/10/2021
TIME—The vanishing logo—posted 3/25/2021
— What's happening? We need you to let us know what's up with you so we can post it! — tl.as@tlasconnect.com
• • •
"Author, Author"
Celebrity Nation:
How America Evolved Into A Culture Of Fans And Followers.
By Landon Y. Jones
• • •
American Urbanist: How William H. Whyte’s Unconventional Wisdom Reshaped Public Life.
By Richard K Rein—posted 2/20/2022
While The Music Played A Remarkable Story of Courage and Friendship in WWII By Nathaniel Lande.
A “Must-Read” for Alumni: The Perfect Assignment, A Memoir of Journalism in the Golden Age.
By Jonathan Z. Larsen, reviewed by Jeremy Main -—posted March 8, 2020
The Birds of Wisconsin, A Field Guide, By Charles Hagner--posted December 14, 2019
• • •
"It's About TIME"
It’s Just "1271 Sixth Avenue" Now! and other notes of interest.
• • •
"Farewells"
Alex Taylor III, 79; Rossiter J. (Ross) Drake Jr., 83; Mary Dunn, 76; Harold Burton (“Burt”) Meyers, 99;
Gary Ronberg, 82; Kelso Sutton, 84; Anita Verschoth, 90; Wilton Woods,79; Stephen Silverman, 71;
Paul Montague, 86; John Underwood, 88; Blaine Marshall, 80;Sheldon Czapnik, 75; Putney Westerfield, 93;
Tran Thi Nga, 95; Jerrold Schecter, 90; Walter Censor, 87;Grant Wahl, 48;Jule Campbell, 96; Gail Cameron Wescott, 90; David Beckwith. 79; Bill Rukeyser, 83; Christopher Ogden, 77; Jean Wilma Patterson Jeffreys, 81;
Gene Light, 90 Martha Goolrick, 98; Thomas J. Hickey Jr, 84; Eleanor Graves, 95; Donald Barr, 87; Jane Nelson, 74; John Leo, 86; Kenny Moore, 78; Lawrence Malkin, 91 Marion Steinmann, 92; Robert Shnayerson, 96;
Michelle McNally, 66; Billy Reed, 78; James A. Drake, 89; Frederick Painton, 95;
Peter Bird Martin, 92; Stuart Schoffman, 73; James Christopher Porterfield, 84; David Leo Long, 75; Joseph Kane, 84;Rhett Austell Jr., 96; Doris Laffan, 96; Peter A. Young, 87; Richard Stolley, 92; Burjor Nargolwala, 99;F. Patrick Lintott, 90; Joan Dumper Mebane, 84; Richard T. Serafin, 79;Mary Elizabeth Morris, 100;
Charles Rubens II, 90; Janet McDougall, 80; Robert C. Foster III, 84.
Click on the "Farewells" tab at the top of this page for more. . . .
Ambassador FlorCruz (scroll down)
The Death of a Name--posted 7/14/2021
Life Magazine and The Power of Photography--posted 2/6/2021
Magazine Photography Exhibits Reviewed --posted 7/18/2021
"The Eagle has Landed" and The Drive to Woodstock --Posted 7/22/19
• • •
Click on the buttons above to go to these pages of this newsletter.
"What's News"
Alumni Get Together in Sydney
Jumping Into a Nazi Prison
Remembering a unique and all but forgotten Timeincer by Jeremy Main
HEALTH CARE UPDATE NOTICE
Name Change but No Services Change --Posted 4/4/23
Enthusiasm Down Under—posted 9/17/2022
Waber’s Crocodile On Film —posted 6/29/2022
The magazine business: from the coolest placeto the coldest —posted 5/18/2022
Before it was possible? by Bob Gomel —posted 5/18/2022
The Stolley Memorial
With as much laughter as tears, some 125 guests, mostly Time Life alumni, gathered. . .—posted 3/11/2022
Fortune and the Theranos Scandal—posted 2/14/2022
TIME Alumni Greetings from Down-Under —posted 12/30/2021
From high-tech to bagels, Mitch Klaif, a former senior vice president at Time Inc.,
and his wife, Diane, will open a bagel shop in New Milford, Connecticut —posted 10/24/2021
•
Where The Time & Life Building Was Born—posted 5/10/2021
TIME—The vanishing logo—posted 3/25/2021
— What's happening? We need you to let us know what's up with you so we can post it! — tl.as@tlasconnect.com
• • •
"Author, Author"
Celebrity Nation:
How America Evolved Into A Culture Of Fans And Followers.
By Landon Y. Jones
• • •
American Urbanist: How William H. Whyte’s Unconventional Wisdom Reshaped Public Life.
By Richard K Rein—posted 2/20/2022
While The Music Played A Remarkable Story of Courage and Friendship in WWII By Nathaniel Lande.
A “Must-Read” for Alumni: The Perfect Assignment, A Memoir of Journalism in the Golden Age.
By Jonathan Z. Larsen, reviewed by Jeremy Main -—posted March 8, 2020
The Birds of Wisconsin, A Field Guide, By Charles Hagner--posted December 14, 2019
• • •
"It's About TIME"
It’s Just "1271 Sixth Avenue" Now! and other notes of interest.
• • •
"Farewells"
Alex Taylor III, 79; Rossiter J. (Ross) Drake Jr., 83; Mary Dunn, 76; Harold Burton (“Burt”) Meyers, 99;
Gary Ronberg, 82; Kelso Sutton, 84; Anita Verschoth, 90; Wilton Woods,79; Stephen Silverman, 71;
Paul Montague, 86; John Underwood, 88; Blaine Marshall, 80;Sheldon Czapnik, 75; Putney Westerfield, 93;
Tran Thi Nga, 95; Jerrold Schecter, 90; Walter Censor, 87;Grant Wahl, 48;Jule Campbell, 96; Gail Cameron Wescott, 90; David Beckwith. 79; Bill Rukeyser, 83; Christopher Ogden, 77; Jean Wilma Patterson Jeffreys, 81;
Gene Light, 90 Martha Goolrick, 98; Thomas J. Hickey Jr, 84; Eleanor Graves, 95; Donald Barr, 87; Jane Nelson, 74; John Leo, 86; Kenny Moore, 78; Lawrence Malkin, 91 Marion Steinmann, 92; Robert Shnayerson, 96;
Michelle McNally, 66; Billy Reed, 78; James A. Drake, 89; Frederick Painton, 95;
Peter Bird Martin, 92; Stuart Schoffman, 73; James Christopher Porterfield, 84; David Leo Long, 75; Joseph Kane, 84;Rhett Austell Jr., 96; Doris Laffan, 96; Peter A. Young, 87; Richard Stolley, 92; Burjor Nargolwala, 99;F. Patrick Lintott, 90; Joan Dumper Mebane, 84; Richard T. Serafin, 79;Mary Elizabeth Morris, 100;
Charles Rubens II, 90; Janet McDougall, 80; Robert C. Foster III, 84.
Click on the "Farewells" tab at the top of this page for more. . . .
A History of “TLAS,” Our Newsletter
Sometime after the Time Life Alumni Society began, Gene Light created a classic logo for the group and began producing a “Newsletter.” He set the publications pace, gathered and illustrated stories, drew cartoons, collared Al Freni and his camera to cover events etc. (Al stayed behind productively until recently). Gene worked with the various presidents and members as editors and writers and put up, he warned me, with a lot of complaints about spelling. When Jeremy was asked to take over the edit duties, he called me and said he’d agree to edit, if I would design. I agreed! (Ralph Graves “drafted” Jeremy to edit the Dutch Treat Club annual books that I had been designing since 1988. We produced a number of those book together.) Jeremy Main and I took on “TLAS” between the presidencies of Don Underwood and Carky Rubens. By that time the group had become called, simply, “TLAS.” I updated the TLAS format and TLAS as a logo several times over the years as thought needed.
One of the first issues Jeremy and I collaborated on dated Fall 2006 contained a picture essay of the TLAS tour of Russia, John Dominis as a Surfer, and unfortunately a farewell to Phil Kunhardt (who had assigned me to design the Life Special issue on the Moon Landing.)
As a team, Jeremy and I produced three or so issues of TLAS a year until about 2015 when Time Inc was no longer there to foot the print bill. We had by then, with able assist from Time Inc IT, created “tlasconnect.com,” the webletter and have maintained it since. The website will remain posted until the end of 2023 when its funding runs out. “MailChimp, our group e-mail will continue as needed.
I recently mentioned to Jeremy that we had been producing the newsletter for 17 years, he took a minute and replied: “and we’ve never had an argument!” --Bob Essman —posted 3/3/23
Sometime after the Time Life Alumni Society began, Gene Light created a classic logo for the group and began producing a “Newsletter.” He set the publications pace, gathered and illustrated stories, drew cartoons, collared Al Freni and his camera to cover events etc. (Al stayed behind productively until recently). Gene worked with the various presidents and members as editors and writers and put up, he warned me, with a lot of complaints about spelling. When Jeremy was asked to take over the edit duties, he called me and said he’d agree to edit, if I would design. I agreed! (Ralph Graves “drafted” Jeremy to edit the Dutch Treat Club annual books that I had been designing since 1988. We produced a number of those book together.) Jeremy Main and I took on “TLAS” between the presidencies of Don Underwood and Carky Rubens. By that time the group had become called, simply, “TLAS.” I updated the TLAS format and TLAS as a logo several times over the years as thought needed.
One of the first issues Jeremy and I collaborated on dated Fall 2006 contained a picture essay of the TLAS tour of Russia, John Dominis as a Surfer, and unfortunately a farewell to Phil Kunhardt (who had assigned me to design the Life Special issue on the Moon Landing.)
As a team, Jeremy and I produced three or so issues of TLAS a year until about 2015 when Time Inc was no longer there to foot the print bill. We had by then, with able assist from Time Inc IT, created “tlasconnect.com,” the webletter and have maintained it since. The website will remain posted until the end of 2023 when its funding runs out. “MailChimp, our group e-mail will continue as needed.
I recently mentioned to Jeremy that we had been producing the newsletter for 17 years, he took a minute and replied: “and we’ve never had an argument!” --Bob Essman —posted 3/3/23
Talk about celebrities!
Here is Martha Stewart, once again. This time she is on the cover of Sports Illustrated in the somewhat notorious and very popular swimsuit edition. At 81 she doesn’t show as much as a wrinkle, blemish or even a little flab. Maye Musk, Elon’s mother, appeared on last year’s swimsuit cover at the age of 74. Is this a trend? Maye Musk, a professional model, is certainly beautiful but rather serious and slim rather than curvaceous. Martha Stewart on the other hand, shows plenty of cleavage and wears a seductive smile. Martha wears a one-piece bathing suit and not the sort of bare bikini that most of the swimsuit models wear.
Asked by The New York Times how she felt about appearing on the SI cover, Martha said “I’m still healthy, my hair is nice, and my skin is good.” If she hadn’t felt good about her appearance she would not have done the shoot. But still she did make some preparations in the two months she had before the shoot. She went into Pilates three times a week and had a light tan spray.
If SI wanted to get attention and create controversy, the Martha Stewart cover certainly did it. The newspapers, TV stations and particularly Instagram were all over it. The comments, mostly from women, mostly seemed to support her courage in exposing herself at this age. --Posted 6/5/23 [see Celebrity Nation in Author Author]
Here is Martha Stewart, once again. This time she is on the cover of Sports Illustrated in the somewhat notorious and very popular swimsuit edition. At 81 she doesn’t show as much as a wrinkle, blemish or even a little flab. Maye Musk, Elon’s mother, appeared on last year’s swimsuit cover at the age of 74. Is this a trend? Maye Musk, a professional model, is certainly beautiful but rather serious and slim rather than curvaceous. Martha Stewart on the other hand, shows plenty of cleavage and wears a seductive smile. Martha wears a one-piece bathing suit and not the sort of bare bikini that most of the swimsuit models wear.
Asked by The New York Times how she felt about appearing on the SI cover, Martha said “I’m still healthy, my hair is nice, and my skin is good.” If she hadn’t felt good about her appearance she would not have done the shoot. But still she did make some preparations in the two months she had before the shoot. She went into Pilates three times a week and had a light tan spray.
If SI wanted to get attention and create controversy, the Martha Stewart cover certainly did it. The newspapers, TV stations and particularly Instagram were all over it. The comments, mostly from women, mostly seemed to support her courage in exposing herself at this age. --Posted 6/5/23 [see Celebrity Nation in Author Author]
The Revolt of the Vestal Virgins
Speaking at a celebration of Time’s 20th anniversary in 1940, Henry Luce described the magazine’s researchers as “a modern female priesthood, the veritable vestal virgins whom levitous writers cajole in vain and managing editors learn humbly to appease.” This somewhat patrician respect for researchers—so long as they were in their place—remained the attitude at the magazine;s men for another 30 years.
The Luce quote and other stories about Time Inc’s suppression and belated recognition of women’s talents and rights is told in Undaunted The Story of Women’s Struggles to Achieve Equality with Men as Journalists. The author Brooke Kroeger has written a detailed history about women in journalism, going back to Ida Tarbel, one of the famed group of muckrakers at the beginning of the 20th century, and goes on to write about Dorothy Thompson and Ann O’Hare McCormick and the few women whose talents broke through the male fortress in the press. (Time wrote an insulting piece about Dorothy Thompson and her “plump legs”).
At Time Inc. the outstanding exception in the male-dominated magazines was Margaret Bourke White, hired by Henry Luce to take pictures of industry for Fortune and then one of the first four staff photographers hired by Life in 1936. However, the parochial Time Life alumnus looking for a detailed history of women’s role in Time Inc. will only find scraps in this book.
By 1970 little had changed at Time and Life. “It is hard to understand why the women reacted so slowly in their own interest, especially given the period’s loud and insistent drumbeat for change,” Kroeger writes.
Early in 1970 the women at Newsweek had filed a gender discrimination suit. Within two months, 94 of the 200 women at Time, Life, Sports Illustrated and Time Life Books filed a complaint with the New York State Division of Human Rights and finally Time Inc. began to move. The women at many other newspapers and news operations followed quickly with their own actions. Nobody is talking about “vestal virgins” these days.
Henry Grunwald, then Time’s managing editor, went along with the new order but evidently with some difficulty. He wrote in a memo in 1970. “I must add in candor that I have not met many women who seem to have the physical and mental energies required for Time senior editing.” Imagine anybody saying that today. Tell it to Nancy Gibbs, who wrote a record 150 cover stories for Time and then became its managing editor. Or tell it to Carol Loomis of Fortune, for years one of the country’s top business writers.
[Undaunted, How Women Changed American Journalism by Brooke Kroeger. Alfred A Knopf $35]
Speaking at a celebration of Time’s 20th anniversary in 1940, Henry Luce described the magazine’s researchers as “a modern female priesthood, the veritable vestal virgins whom levitous writers cajole in vain and managing editors learn humbly to appease.” This somewhat patrician respect for researchers—so long as they were in their place—remained the attitude at the magazine;s men for another 30 years.
The Luce quote and other stories about Time Inc’s suppression and belated recognition of women’s talents and rights is told in Undaunted The Story of Women’s Struggles to Achieve Equality with Men as Journalists. The author Brooke Kroeger has written a detailed history about women in journalism, going back to Ida Tarbel, one of the famed group of muckrakers at the beginning of the 20th century, and goes on to write about Dorothy Thompson and Ann O’Hare McCormick and the few women whose talents broke through the male fortress in the press. (Time wrote an insulting piece about Dorothy Thompson and her “plump legs”).
At Time Inc. the outstanding exception in the male-dominated magazines was Margaret Bourke White, hired by Henry Luce to take pictures of industry for Fortune and then one of the first four staff photographers hired by Life in 1936. However, the parochial Time Life alumnus looking for a detailed history of women’s role in Time Inc. will only find scraps in this book.
By 1970 little had changed at Time and Life. “It is hard to understand why the women reacted so slowly in their own interest, especially given the period’s loud and insistent drumbeat for change,” Kroeger writes.
Early in 1970 the women at Newsweek had filed a gender discrimination suit. Within two months, 94 of the 200 women at Time, Life, Sports Illustrated and Time Life Books filed a complaint with the New York State Division of Human Rights and finally Time Inc. began to move. The women at many other newspapers and news operations followed quickly with their own actions. Nobody is talking about “vestal virgins” these days.
Henry Grunwald, then Time’s managing editor, went along with the new order but evidently with some difficulty. He wrote in a memo in 1970. “I must add in candor that I have not met many women who seem to have the physical and mental energies required for Time senior editing.” Imagine anybody saying that today. Tell it to Nancy Gibbs, who wrote a record 150 cover stories for Time and then became its managing editor. Or tell it to Carol Loomis of Fortune, for years one of the country’s top business writers.
[Undaunted, How Women Changed American Journalism by Brooke Kroeger. Alfred A Knopf $35]
This was a uniquue LIFE promotion worth reminding us of those plush old days at Time Inc. --posted 2/17/24
• • •
Hooper Recalls
I remember an early project of mine was to organize Circulation Promotion files. Time Inc used to send, sometimes quite elaborate Christmas cards to subscribers annually. One year Life’s card was a large transparancy of this Matisse Stained glass window noting that was commissioned by LIFE. The window was exhibited in the lobby of 9 Rock Center and then donated to MOMA. I shared Archive correspondance with Matisse, documenting the commission and the subsequent donation.
Bill Hooper
(retired Archivist)
Time Inc., as a LIFE Magazine promotion, commissioned Matisse to create this composition. It’s called Nuit de Noël or Christmas Eve.
• • •
Hooper Recalls
I remember an early project of mine was to organize Circulation Promotion files. Time Inc used to send, sometimes quite elaborate Christmas cards to subscribers annually. One year Life’s card was a large transparancy of this Matisse Stained glass window noting that was commissioned by LIFE. The window was exhibited in the lobby of 9 Rock Center and then donated to MOMA. I shared Archive correspondance with Matisse, documenting the commission and the subsequent donation.
Bill Hooper
(retired Archivist)
Time Inc., as a LIFE Magazine promotion, commissioned Matisse to create this composition. It’s called Nuit de Noël or Christmas Eve.
This First Issue of Time Magazine appeared March 3 1923, 100 Years Ago
We are all grateful to Mr Luce and Mr Hadden for the great lives
they gave us!
A Quiet 100th Birthday
Time magazine marked its 100th birthday with a commemorative cover that reproduced in almost microscopic size 144 of the 5,200 covers published in the last hundred years (see below). That was one of two covers sent out with the March 13 issue. The other cover was a portrait of Kate Blanchette, representing The Women of the Year. Subscribers who got one cover but would prefer the other can call in to get a copy free (1-800-843-8463).
A PR release from the magazine says “Time begins the year-long celebration of its centennial with the release of A Century of Impact, a new multi-platform editorial project that both commemorates the enduring power of Time’s iconic red border and looks toward the next century by exploring the voices, ideas, and innovations that will drive global progress for the future.”
The press release says Time now reaches “the largest audience in its history—more than 100 million people around the world across its platforms.”The actual paid circulation of the magazine itself is “more than 1 million subscribers.” In the 1980s the magazine’s guaranteed circulation base was 4.6 million. That decline plus the meager number of ads in the anniversary issue perhaps explain the difference between this muted birthday celebration and another 50 years ago, when Time spent perhaps too lavishly.
For Time’s 40th birthday in 1963, we invited all the living cover subjects of the previous 40 years (tyrants, villains and the very old excepted) to come to New York as the magazine’s guests. The celebration culminated in a banquet for 1,668, including the 284 cover subjects who came, in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria. Among them were Miguel Alemán, Eugene Black, Al Capp, John Dos Passos, Rex Harrison, Lyndon Johnson, Gina Lollobrigida, Jean Monnet, Dean Rusk and Darryl Zanuck.
Those days are gone. If you look back at the early days of Time you can see how much has changed. In the beginning and for many years after, women were hired only as secretaries and researchers. A photo in the current issue shows eight of the top leaders of Time today. Five of them are women. Most of its existence Time was divided neatly into a dozen or more sections such as “world” and “cinema,” each with several short articles to keep readers informed of the essential news. Only the cover story ran to several pages. Today’s magazine is not divided into sections and each issue carries several long articles. For most of its life, Time was a weekly. Now it comes out twice a month.
Time is a lot more than a magazine now. It is a franchise. That began in the 1930s with the introduction of The March of Time, a monthly news film showed in movie theaters. It was a journalistic success, but not a moneymaker. Today Time tells its stories through a whole range of outlets on film, video and social platforms. (Of course, Time the Corporation also pushed into many new fields, including the successful HBO venture and the disastrous merger with AOL.)
The last page of the birthday issue carries an interview with Bill Hooper, the Time Inc. archivist who now looks after the company archives in their new home at the New-York Historical Society. Hooper says that while Henry Luce gets credit for developing the magazine empire, it was his prep school and college friend Briton Hadden, the partner who died at 29, who was the creative genius. He gave Time its distinctive style. The early Time as Hadden conceived it consisted of many short articles designed to help the “busy man” catch up quickly on the important news. He thought newspapers were too wordy so Time became famous for its short, punchy and sometimes inverted sentences—a style since modified. Hooper recalls the story of Marie Menken Maas, who worked for years on Time’s copy desk but also made avant-garde movies. She and her husband an English professor spent memorable weekends in their apartment in Brooklyn entertaining notable friends such as Truman Capote, drinking heavily and arguing ferociously with each other. One of the regular guests was playwright Edward Albee. He said that he based his play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf about a couple who argued viciously on those weekends in Brooklyn. —Jeremy Main —posted March 12 2023
We are all grateful to Mr Luce and Mr Hadden for the great lives
they gave us!
A Quiet 100th Birthday
Time magazine marked its 100th birthday with a commemorative cover that reproduced in almost microscopic size 144 of the 5,200 covers published in the last hundred years (see below). That was one of two covers sent out with the March 13 issue. The other cover was a portrait of Kate Blanchette, representing The Women of the Year. Subscribers who got one cover but would prefer the other can call in to get a copy free (1-800-843-8463).
A PR release from the magazine says “Time begins the year-long celebration of its centennial with the release of A Century of Impact, a new multi-platform editorial project that both commemorates the enduring power of Time’s iconic red border and looks toward the next century by exploring the voices, ideas, and innovations that will drive global progress for the future.”
The press release says Time now reaches “the largest audience in its history—more than 100 million people around the world across its platforms.”The actual paid circulation of the magazine itself is “more than 1 million subscribers.” In the 1980s the magazine’s guaranteed circulation base was 4.6 million. That decline plus the meager number of ads in the anniversary issue perhaps explain the difference between this muted birthday celebration and another 50 years ago, when Time spent perhaps too lavishly.
For Time’s 40th birthday in 1963, we invited all the living cover subjects of the previous 40 years (tyrants, villains and the very old excepted) to come to New York as the magazine’s guests. The celebration culminated in a banquet for 1,668, including the 284 cover subjects who came, in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria. Among them were Miguel Alemán, Eugene Black, Al Capp, John Dos Passos, Rex Harrison, Lyndon Johnson, Gina Lollobrigida, Jean Monnet, Dean Rusk and Darryl Zanuck.
Those days are gone. If you look back at the early days of Time you can see how much has changed. In the beginning and for many years after, women were hired only as secretaries and researchers. A photo in the current issue shows eight of the top leaders of Time today. Five of them are women. Most of its existence Time was divided neatly into a dozen or more sections such as “world” and “cinema,” each with several short articles to keep readers informed of the essential news. Only the cover story ran to several pages. Today’s magazine is not divided into sections and each issue carries several long articles. For most of its life, Time was a weekly. Now it comes out twice a month.
Time is a lot more than a magazine now. It is a franchise. That began in the 1930s with the introduction of The March of Time, a monthly news film showed in movie theaters. It was a journalistic success, but not a moneymaker. Today Time tells its stories through a whole range of outlets on film, video and social platforms. (Of course, Time the Corporation also pushed into many new fields, including the successful HBO venture and the disastrous merger with AOL.)
The last page of the birthday issue carries an interview with Bill Hooper, the Time Inc. archivist who now looks after the company archives in their new home at the New-York Historical Society. Hooper says that while Henry Luce gets credit for developing the magazine empire, it was his prep school and college friend Briton Hadden, the partner who died at 29, who was the creative genius. He gave Time its distinctive style. The early Time as Hadden conceived it consisted of many short articles designed to help the “busy man” catch up quickly on the important news. He thought newspapers were too wordy so Time became famous for its short, punchy and sometimes inverted sentences—a style since modified. Hooper recalls the story of Marie Menken Maas, who worked for years on Time’s copy desk but also made avant-garde movies. She and her husband an English professor spent memorable weekends in their apartment in Brooklyn entertaining notable friends such as Truman Capote, drinking heavily and arguing ferociously with each other. One of the regular guests was playwright Edward Albee. He said that he based his play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf about a couple who argued viciously on those weekends in Brooklyn. —Jeremy Main —posted March 12 2023
I opened the TLAS Mailbox. . .
I opened the TLAS Mailbox for one last time, Janet and Linda, the other key holders, are gone, and I shed a tear for all that our wonderful group accomplished, how much work Janet did for the last directory, and how much we all loved to be a part of this large collegial organization. May all of us look back in fondness, remembering that we were there.
Ralph Spielman
The USPS has my forwarding address.
P.S. tlasconnect.com will continue until the end of this year.
MailChimp emails will post whenever there is worthy news.
Facebook Groups:
You may apply for membership in any of these groups
Fortune Magazine Alumni • People Alumni (1980-1990)
• Sports Illustrated Alumni • TIME inc alumni
• TIME Inc. IT - The Way it Was • TIME LIFE ALUMNI SOCIETY
—posted 2/18/23
I opened the TLAS Mailbox for one last time, Janet and Linda, the other key holders, are gone, and I shed a tear for all that our wonderful group accomplished, how much work Janet did for the last directory, and how much we all loved to be a part of this large collegial organization. May all of us look back in fondness, remembering that we were there.
Ralph Spielman
The USPS has my forwarding address.
P.S. tlasconnect.com will continue until the end of this year.
MailChimp emails will post whenever there is worthy news.
Facebook Groups:
You may apply for membership in any of these groups
Fortune Magazine Alumni • People Alumni (1980-1990)
• Sports Illustrated Alumni • TIME inc alumni
• TIME Inc. IT - The Way it Was • TIME LIFE ALUMNI SOCIETY
—posted 2/18/23
Ambassador FlorCruz
Jaime FlorCruz, the Time magazine correspondent and bureau chief in Beijing for two decades, has been named Philippine ambassador to China. In an ironic twist of history. It was President Ferdinand Marcos Junior who appointed FlorCruz, while his father, the dictator, had exiled FlorCruz to China in 1971.
Jimi, as he was known to his colleagues, was a college student on a summer trip to China in 1971 when Marcos senior declared martial law and cracked down on his opponents. The young FlorCruz found himself barred from returning home: he was stuck in China without a valid passport.
He did not waste his time in exile. During the next 10 years he worked on a state farm in Hunan and in a fishing company in Shandung province, he took two years of intensive Chinese at Beijing Languages Institute, earned a bachelor’s degree in Chinese history from the University of Beijing. He gave English lessons to professors and students and taught songs in English on a weekly TV program.
Newsweek took him on as a correspondent in 1981, but Time got hold of him next year and he remained in the Beijing bureau as correspondent and sometimes bureau chief until 2000. He covered (and subsequently wrote a book about) the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising, the 1997 Hong Kong handover, the explosion of the Chinese economy and the changes in leadership. He continued this work when he became bureau chief for CNN in 2001.
Jimi retired in 2014 but still had his ties to Time Inc. as a consultant. He served as China chairman of Fortune world forums in 2005, 2013 and 2017. He was well established as the dean of foreign correspondents in Beijing and he served as president of the 400-member Foreign Correspondents Association in Beijing. His long experience and good-humored observation of the twists and turns of Chinese policy was reflected in this note he sent to Time’s editors in 1985: “When I arrived, social dancing was taboo. Then in 1978-79 it was pronounced healthy, I found myself waltzing with Chinese women. After that, disco became a craze that I was often urged to demonstrate, until the last year (1984?) when it was banned as ‘spiritual pollution.’ Rules here, it seems, are made to be changed.”
PS. The other Time Incers who became ambassadors were Fortune’s Herman Nickel, and former Time managing editor Henry Grunwald, President Reagan’s ambassadors to South Africa. and Austria, respectively. —JM —posted 2/22/2023
Jaime FlorCruz, the Time magazine correspondent and bureau chief in Beijing for two decades, has been named Philippine ambassador to China. In an ironic twist of history. It was President Ferdinand Marcos Junior who appointed FlorCruz, while his father, the dictator, had exiled FlorCruz to China in 1971.
Jimi, as he was known to his colleagues, was a college student on a summer trip to China in 1971 when Marcos senior declared martial law and cracked down on his opponents. The young FlorCruz found himself barred from returning home: he was stuck in China without a valid passport.
He did not waste his time in exile. During the next 10 years he worked on a state farm in Hunan and in a fishing company in Shandung province, he took two years of intensive Chinese at Beijing Languages Institute, earned a bachelor’s degree in Chinese history from the University of Beijing. He gave English lessons to professors and students and taught songs in English on a weekly TV program.
Newsweek took him on as a correspondent in 1981, but Time got hold of him next year and he remained in the Beijing bureau as correspondent and sometimes bureau chief until 2000. He covered (and subsequently wrote a book about) the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising, the 1997 Hong Kong handover, the explosion of the Chinese economy and the changes in leadership. He continued this work when he became bureau chief for CNN in 2001.
Jimi retired in 2014 but still had his ties to Time Inc. as a consultant. He served as China chairman of Fortune world forums in 2005, 2013 and 2017. He was well established as the dean of foreign correspondents in Beijing and he served as president of the 400-member Foreign Correspondents Association in Beijing. His long experience and good-humored observation of the twists and turns of Chinese policy was reflected in this note he sent to Time’s editors in 1985: “When I arrived, social dancing was taboo. Then in 1978-79 it was pronounced healthy, I found myself waltzing with Chinese women. After that, disco became a craze that I was often urged to demonstrate, until the last year (1984?) when it was banned as ‘spiritual pollution.’ Rules here, it seems, are made to be changed.”
PS. The other Time Incers who became ambassadors were Fortune’s Herman Nickel, and former Time managing editor Henry Grunwald, President Reagan’s ambassadors to South Africa. and Austria, respectively. —JM —posted 2/22/2023
• • •
TLAS NO MORE
It took patience and persistence, especially on the part of our secretary, Carolyn McCandless, and
our treasurer, George Vollmuth, but the New York Department of State has finally agreed and certified that
the Time Life Alumni Society no longer exists.
The process began early in 2020 when the Board decided the TLAS should fold. With no corporation to back us up and with diminishing interest on the part of new retirees from troubled magazines, the TLAS could not survive. In subsequent meetings on Zoom and in many emails we took up a whole lot of questions that we needed to decide, including the paperwork required by the state of New York to certify that we were finished. So now we have reached a state of what the New York Department of State calls “perpetual dissolution.”
Here is the email Carolyn sent to the Board members on September 3:
As of September 1, I finally received the attached receipt (not included) which is the official documentation of the dissolution of the Time-Life Alumni Society, Inc.
This process has been long and drawn out. Our records at New York State were not digitized so initially everything had to be by hand. I filed what I thought were our final papers on January 7, 2022 which included a $30 check for the official dissolution fee. NY State took four months to cash our check and seven months to respond officially. Calls to the customer service number just ended up with the phrase that everything was taking at least 60 to 90 days.
I finally talked to a supervisor on Thursday who had me make a mechanical change on our Certificate of Dissolution. She even gave me her email address (a rare privilege) so I could respond quickly. Five minutes after I sent her the final document, I had our official dissolution. With the Covid backlog, she claimed there were still 85,000 organizations in the queue for various official documents.
Our remaining balance at Chase is $6,096.22. A check for this balance is being sent to School Life Media as approved by the Board about two years ago. They had earlier received a check for $8,000 as we thought we were finishing up our paperwork the end of last year. I have an appointment with our Chase banker on September 21 to officially close our account.
In our proxy materials that we submitted to our membership in October 2020, we had a cash balance of $79,321. George Vollmuth and I will work on an analysis of where all the cash went. The big items are the scholarships:
University of Missouri $25,000
Mercy College 25,000
School Life Media 14,096
In addition we had to pay for the materials and mailing for the Membership Meeting to approve the dissolution and the printing and distribution of the final Membership Directory.
George and I will also be working on the documents that need to be retained and for how long. They will probably end up in the basement of my house in Pound Ridge, NY.
If you have any questions, please let me know. —Carolyn McCandless
What’s left?
With the exception of Money, the major magazines—perhaps less robust than they were —are still published under different owners. Time is still a weekly and Fortune a monthly and both have print and digital editions. Each has a different new owner, Sports Illustrated, which now belongs Authentic Brands Group, is the centerpiece of an effort to make more money under the SI brand. Meredith, which bought all the Time magazines three years ago, continues to publish People and Real Simple, but killed Money. (see stories below)
Our website will remain available online until the contract we have expires at the end of 2023. However, Bob Essman and I will reduce our contributions, if any, to a minimum. Bob will occasionally send information of interest via MailChimp, our mass e-mail service. Note: The proper address for our website is tlasconnect.com. A warning: if you Google simply TLAS you are likely to get the Tirana Legal Aid Society or a number of other organizations with similar initials.
Ralph Spielman and Carmen Barnes have volunteered, generously, to maintain our Facebook page for all alumni: Time Life Alumni Society. Facebook pages exist for each of the magazines and are listed in the last directory. Ralph will continue to monitor our mailbox (PO Box 231035, Ansonia Station, New York 10023 NY) until it closes on January 31, 2023. And of course, you can still keep in touch with our diminishing number of alumni through the email addresses in the final directory.
Stay in touch! Jeremy Main
—posted 9/17/2022
• • •
TLAS NO MORE
It took patience and persistence, especially on the part of our secretary, Carolyn McCandless, and
our treasurer, George Vollmuth, but the New York Department of State has finally agreed and certified that
the Time Life Alumni Society no longer exists.
The process began early in 2020 when the Board decided the TLAS should fold. With no corporation to back us up and with diminishing interest on the part of new retirees from troubled magazines, the TLAS could not survive. In subsequent meetings on Zoom and in many emails we took up a whole lot of questions that we needed to decide, including the paperwork required by the state of New York to certify that we were finished. So now we have reached a state of what the New York Department of State calls “perpetual dissolution.”
Here is the email Carolyn sent to the Board members on September 3:
As of September 1, I finally received the attached receipt (not included) which is the official documentation of the dissolution of the Time-Life Alumni Society, Inc.
This process has been long and drawn out. Our records at New York State were not digitized so initially everything had to be by hand. I filed what I thought were our final papers on January 7, 2022 which included a $30 check for the official dissolution fee. NY State took four months to cash our check and seven months to respond officially. Calls to the customer service number just ended up with the phrase that everything was taking at least 60 to 90 days.
I finally talked to a supervisor on Thursday who had me make a mechanical change on our Certificate of Dissolution. She even gave me her email address (a rare privilege) so I could respond quickly. Five minutes after I sent her the final document, I had our official dissolution. With the Covid backlog, she claimed there were still 85,000 organizations in the queue for various official documents.
Our remaining balance at Chase is $6,096.22. A check for this balance is being sent to School Life Media as approved by the Board about two years ago. They had earlier received a check for $8,000 as we thought we were finishing up our paperwork the end of last year. I have an appointment with our Chase banker on September 21 to officially close our account.
In our proxy materials that we submitted to our membership in October 2020, we had a cash balance of $79,321. George Vollmuth and I will work on an analysis of where all the cash went. The big items are the scholarships:
University of Missouri $25,000
Mercy College 25,000
School Life Media 14,096
In addition we had to pay for the materials and mailing for the Membership Meeting to approve the dissolution and the printing and distribution of the final Membership Directory.
George and I will also be working on the documents that need to be retained and for how long. They will probably end up in the basement of my house in Pound Ridge, NY.
If you have any questions, please let me know. —Carolyn McCandless
What’s left?
With the exception of Money, the major magazines—perhaps less robust than they were —are still published under different owners. Time is still a weekly and Fortune a monthly and both have print and digital editions. Each has a different new owner, Sports Illustrated, which now belongs Authentic Brands Group, is the centerpiece of an effort to make more money under the SI brand. Meredith, which bought all the Time magazines three years ago, continues to publish People and Real Simple, but killed Money. (see stories below)
Our website will remain available online until the contract we have expires at the end of 2023. However, Bob Essman and I will reduce our contributions, if any, to a minimum. Bob will occasionally send information of interest via MailChimp, our mass e-mail service. Note: The proper address for our website is tlasconnect.com. A warning: if you Google simply TLAS you are likely to get the Tirana Legal Aid Society or a number of other organizations with similar initials.
Ralph Spielman and Carmen Barnes have volunteered, generously, to maintain our Facebook page for all alumni: Time Life Alumni Society. Facebook pages exist for each of the magazines and are listed in the last directory. Ralph will continue to monitor our mailbox (PO Box 231035, Ansonia Station, New York 10023 NY) until it closes on January 31, 2023. And of course, you can still keep in touch with our diminishing number of alumni through the email addresses in the final directory.
Stay in touch! Jeremy Main
—posted 9/17/2022
• • •
The New Fortune
If you had been at Fortune 30 or 40 years ago, as I was, you would be astounded at the masthead carried today. Instead of two or three dozen editors and writers, designers and others, you will find a list of about 300 working to put out the monthly and all its new byproducts. Just two of the names, Geoff Colvin and Shawn Tully, would be recognizable to anyone who was around in those days.
The masthead, which comes at the end of the elaborate Fortune website, lists the editors and others you expect to find in New York, but you will now find sizable editorial offices as well as separate business offices in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. The list includes positions that did not exist before, such as technology officer, chief brand officer, leadership editor, crypto editor, a senior vice president for the brand studio, which itself has a large staff, and the people who handle half a dozen specialized newsletters, podcasts, lists of the most important or successful or most promising people in this or that category, as well as the conferences which have long been one of Fortune’s most successful offerings.
While a writer at the old Fortune might have been required to turn out a dozen articles a year or fewer, most of them long and exhaustively researched, today’s writer might typically produce 100 articles, most of them short and quick. The news that appears on the Associated Press wires will also appear just about as soon on the Fortune website.
Chatchaval Jiaravanon, a son of the owner of Thailand’s largest conglomerate, purchased Fortune four years ago from Meredith for $150 million and evidently does not mind spending some more. He moved the magazine staff into handsome new offices in downtown Manhattan. While other magazine enterprises contract, Fortune expands. Alan Murray, last managing editor of the old Fortune, is now the CEO of Fortune Media. He came to Fortune in 2015 from a career at the Pew Research Center and The Wall Street Journal. —Jeremy Main —posted 11/20/2022
The masthead, which comes at the end of the elaborate Fortune website, lists the editors and others you expect to find in New York, but you will now find sizable editorial offices as well as separate business offices in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. The list includes positions that did not exist before, such as technology officer, chief brand officer, leadership editor, crypto editor, a senior vice president for the brand studio, which itself has a large staff, and the people who handle half a dozen specialized newsletters, podcasts, lists of the most important or successful or most promising people in this or that category, as well as the conferences which have long been one of Fortune’s most successful offerings.
While a writer at the old Fortune might have been required to turn out a dozen articles a year or fewer, most of them long and exhaustively researched, today’s writer might typically produce 100 articles, most of them short and quick. The news that appears on the Associated Press wires will also appear just about as soon on the Fortune website.
Chatchaval Jiaravanon, a son of the owner of Thailand’s largest conglomerate, purchased Fortune four years ago from Meredith for $150 million and evidently does not mind spending some more. He moved the magazine staff into handsome new offices in downtown Manhattan. While other magazine enterprises contract, Fortune expands. Alan Murray, last managing editor of the old Fortune, is now the CEO of Fortune Media. He came to Fortune in 2015 from a career at the Pew Research Center and The Wall Street Journal. —Jeremy Main —posted 11/20/2022
EW, Two Others Drop Print Editions
Dotdash, Barry Diller’s digital enterprise, announced it would drop the print editions of three of the ex-Time Inc. magazines it recently acquired in a merger with Meredith (see below). They are Entertainment Week, In Style and People en Espaňol. As of April, these publications will be websites only. Dotdash estimated that about 200 people would lose their jobs.
In a tribute to EW that appeared in The Wrap, Benjamin Svetkey, a 22-year veteran writer and editor at the magazine, wrote: “it’s hard to imagine in 2022, in a world where print magazines seem about as relevant as ladies hats and men’s spats, but back in the 1990s and well into the 2000s, EW was the most powerful voice in entertainment journalism. . . Everybody in Hollywood read it.”
He said “whatever was on its covers. . . became the topic everyone (in Hollywood) talked about for the next seven days.” Svetkey argued that the “super–savvy, smartass the attitude. . . was the secret sauce that made the magazine great. . . Ironically, EW itself lost that voice somewhere along the line, stumbling through a decade of editorial misfires” such as going monthly, layoffs and most recently workplace scandals. —posted 2/11/2022
Dotdash also announced that it was closing down the daily PeopleTV show, which Time Inc. launched in 2016 into an already saturated market for celebrity news. It never took off. However, the PeopleTV streaming app will still appear on various platforms.
InStyle is relatively late among fashion magazines to close its print edition. Glamour, Marie Claire and others had closed theirs some time ago. A Dotdash spokesman said the online traffic for InStyle had increased 40% in the last year. Laura Brown, the popular Australian editor-in-chief of InStyle, joins the 200 whose jobs have been eliminated. —posted 4/7/2022
Dotdash, Barry Diller’s digital enterprise, announced it would drop the print editions of three of the ex-Time Inc. magazines it recently acquired in a merger with Meredith (see below). They are Entertainment Week, In Style and People en Espaňol. As of April, these publications will be websites only. Dotdash estimated that about 200 people would lose their jobs.
In a tribute to EW that appeared in The Wrap, Benjamin Svetkey, a 22-year veteran writer and editor at the magazine, wrote: “it’s hard to imagine in 2022, in a world where print magazines seem about as relevant as ladies hats and men’s spats, but back in the 1990s and well into the 2000s, EW was the most powerful voice in entertainment journalism. . . Everybody in Hollywood read it.”
He said “whatever was on its covers. . . became the topic everyone (in Hollywood) talked about for the next seven days.” Svetkey argued that the “super–savvy, smartass the attitude. . . was the secret sauce that made the magazine great. . . Ironically, EW itself lost that voice somewhere along the line, stumbling through a decade of editorial misfires” such as going monthly, layoffs and most recently workplace scandals. —posted 2/11/2022
Dotdash also announced that it was closing down the daily PeopleTV show, which Time Inc. launched in 2016 into an already saturated market for celebrity news. It never took off. However, the PeopleTV streaming app will still appear on various platforms.
InStyle is relatively late among fashion magazines to close its print edition. Glamour, Marie Claire and others had closed theirs some time ago. A Dotdash spokesman said the online traffic for InStyle had increased 40% in the last year. Laura Brown, the popular Australian editor-in-chief of InStyle, joins the 200 whose jobs have been eliminated. —posted 4/7/2022
Now It’s Dotdash
If you are trying to keep up with the fates of our old magazines—or call them brands if you prefer, to keep up-to-date—you should know that some of them now belong to a very large new enterprise called Dotdash Meredith. You will recall that Meredith, a venerable publisher of family-type magazines established in 1902, bought Time Inc. in 2018. Since then Meredith has shed Time, Fortune and Money, but hung on to others such as People, Southern Living and Real Simple.
Evidently the magazines that Meredith kept did not add as much to its online revenues as it expected so Meredith turned to Dotdash, a powerful online publisher of 14 lifestyle sites such as Investopedia and Serious Eats. The new enterprise estimates that it will reach 95% of the women in America.
Dotdash was originally the creation of The New York Times—an effort to improve The Times’ digital efforts—but was sold 10 years ago to Barry Diller’s Interactive Corporation (IAC). Diller has been a major player in the movie and TV industries for years. IAC is an investment company that specialized in technology businesses.
The CEO of the new company, Neil Vogel, comes from Dotdash and says that there is no intention to start cutting staff—as capital investment companies often do after a takeover—but that the new concern is more interested in growth.
One of the new company’s properties, Entertainment Weekly, is reportedly in something of a turmoil. The weekly fired its top editor a year ago because of alleged sexist and racist remarks and now, according to the website TheWrap, the staff is reading an email from an anonymous editor, who styles himself or herself as “the elephant in the room,” who says editorial standards at Entertainment Weekly have so far fallen that it is now “a joke. In spite of the name, Entertainment Weekly now comes out with a monthly print edition but also has a website. —posted 1/20/2022
• • •
If you are trying to keep up with the fates of our old magazines—or call them brands if you prefer, to keep up-to-date—you should know that some of them now belong to a very large new enterprise called Dotdash Meredith. You will recall that Meredith, a venerable publisher of family-type magazines established in 1902, bought Time Inc. in 2018. Since then Meredith has shed Time, Fortune and Money, but hung on to others such as People, Southern Living and Real Simple.
Evidently the magazines that Meredith kept did not add as much to its online revenues as it expected so Meredith turned to Dotdash, a powerful online publisher of 14 lifestyle sites such as Investopedia and Serious Eats. The new enterprise estimates that it will reach 95% of the women in America.
Dotdash was originally the creation of The New York Times—an effort to improve The Times’ digital efforts—but was sold 10 years ago to Barry Diller’s Interactive Corporation (IAC). Diller has been a major player in the movie and TV industries for years. IAC is an investment company that specialized in technology businesses.
The CEO of the new company, Neil Vogel, comes from Dotdash and says that there is no intention to start cutting staff—as capital investment companies often do after a takeover—but that the new concern is more interested in growth.
One of the new company’s properties, Entertainment Weekly, is reportedly in something of a turmoil. The weekly fired its top editor a year ago because of alleged sexist and racist remarks and now, according to the website TheWrap, the staff is reading an email from an anonymous editor, who styles himself or herself as “the elephant in the room,” who says editorial standards at Entertainment Weekly have so far fallen that it is now “a joke. In spite of the name, Entertainment Weekly now comes out with a monthly print edition but also has a website. —posted 1/20/2022
• • •
Peter Meyer (front-and-center) with a class of HCSD 5th-grade junior journalism grads, proudly showing their graduation certificates. The teachers flank the kids on the left and right.
Our TLAS Legacy
TLAS has awarded $8000 to the School Life Media (SLM) which teaches literacy through journalism to middle school students in Hudson, New York, TLAS has already endowed two $25,000 journalism scholarships at the University of Missouri journalism school and at Mercer College in New York.
SLM was established four years ago by Peter Meyer, an editorial veteran of Time, Life and People, and for a number of years after that an editor of Education Next, a quarterly published by the Kennedy Center at Harvard. He served on the Hudson Board of Education for five years before starting SLM.
Peter says that “English Language Arts” as taught in our schools has largely failed poor and students. What he offers instead is a chance for fifth and sixth graders to learn how to write by reporting, taking notes, writing them up, and putting it all together in a dummy front page. Before the pandemic the program reached some 100 students, divided into groups of 20 or 25 during the school year. Peter has two instructors to lead the classes. SLM returned this fall to teach in the after school program, but had to suspend classes because of the Omicron variable.
Hudson has a needy school body with 60% of families below the poverty level, and 70% of the students performing below grade level in ELA.
Depending on what funds he can raise, Peter hopes to expand the program, perhaps even to a national level.
The $8000 for School Life Media came from the balance in the TLAS bank account after the two endowments were made to Missouri and Mercer. Our books have not closed yet because we’re still waiting for the State Attorney General’s office to complete the endless process of declaring us closed up for good. Should there be any funds left then they will also be donated to School of Life Media. —posted 12/30/2021
• • •
Letter to The Editor
The donation of the $8,000 to the SLM initiative is most appropriate and worthwhile. P.S. Congratulations to you and Bob for continuing the effort—the TLAS reach online must be burgeoning! Fergus Maclagan —posted 01/09/2022
The Death of a Name
The name Time Inc. once stood for the greatest collection of magazines in the world. No longer. Time the magazine still exists, but as the property of Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and his wife Lynn (see below). But there is no company bearing the name Time.
For the last three decades Time’s management struggled to counter the effects of lost advertising and the growth of the Internet. The company rolled out new products and made new alliances, which were of little help in the long run and some of which were disasters.
Warner Communications, a major film and cable TV business, and Time Inc. began negotiations in 1987 that led to a merger in 1989. In 2000, AOL, then the premier service for access to the Internet and email, bought Time Warner for $182 billion. How could a company as huge as AOL Time Warner fail? Easily it turned out. Within months came the dot.com market collapse and broadband Internet service was growing fast. In 2002 the company lost $98.7 billion, an all-time record in corporate history. Ted Turner estimated he personally lost $8 billion, or 80% of his fortune. Many Time Incers saw their retirement benefits sink to almost nothing. Time Warner discarded AOL in 2009.
Warner spun off Time Inc. as a separate company with heavy debt once again in 2016. In 2018 Meredith bought the magazines which put an end to Time Inc. as a corporation. However the name lived on in Time Warner. Then when AT&T came along and bought Time Warner. It dropped the name Time from its new acquisition which became once more Warner Communications.
On the newsstands and the web you’ll still see many of the iconic titles--Time, Life, Fortune, Money, Sports Illustrated, but now there is no Time Inc. for the first time in nearly a century.--Jeremy Main —posted 7/14/21
For the last three decades Time’s management struggled to counter the effects of lost advertising and the growth of the Internet. The company rolled out new products and made new alliances, which were of little help in the long run and some of which were disasters.
Warner Communications, a major film and cable TV business, and Time Inc. began negotiations in 1987 that led to a merger in 1989. In 2000, AOL, then the premier service for access to the Internet and email, bought Time Warner for $182 billion. How could a company as huge as AOL Time Warner fail? Easily it turned out. Within months came the dot.com market collapse and broadband Internet service was growing fast. In 2002 the company lost $98.7 billion, an all-time record in corporate history. Ted Turner estimated he personally lost $8 billion, or 80% of his fortune. Many Time Incers saw their retirement benefits sink to almost nothing. Time Warner discarded AOL in 2009.
Warner spun off Time Inc. as a separate company with heavy debt once again in 2016. In 2018 Meredith bought the magazines which put an end to Time Inc. as a corporation. However the name lived on in Time Warner. Then when AT&T came along and bought Time Warner. It dropped the name Time from its new acquisition which became once more Warner Communications.
On the newsstands and the web you’ll still see many of the iconic titles--Time, Life, Fortune, Money, Sports Illustrated, but now there is no Time Inc. for the first time in nearly a century.--Jeremy Main —posted 7/14/21
• • •
Magazine Photography Exhibits Reviewed
Piri Halasz. Time’s former art critic and for the last 25 years a critic on her blog, discusses
Life Magazine and the Power of Photography, the exhibit that opened last year at the Princeton University Art Museum.
Her comments include discussion of Modern Look Photography and the American Magazine,
a show that opened this spring at the Jewish Museum in New York—both now available as books.
She calls her blog “(An Appropriate Distance) From the Mayor’s Doorstep”—she actually lives fairly close to Gracie Mansion. Here is the link to her blog with these reviews
https://www.pirihalasz.com/blog/posts/38981—posted 7/18/21
Magazine Photography Exhibits Reviewed
Piri Halasz. Time’s former art critic and for the last 25 years a critic on her blog, discusses
Life Magazine and the Power of Photography, the exhibit that opened last year at the Princeton University Art Museum.
Her comments include discussion of Modern Look Photography and the American Magazine,
a show that opened this spring at the Jewish Museum in New York—both now available as books.
She calls her blog “(An Appropriate Distance) From the Mayor’s Doorstep”—she actually lives fairly close to Gracie Mansion. Here is the link to her blog with these reviews
https://www.pirihalasz.com/blog/posts/38981—posted 7/18/21
• • •
EXHIBITION
Life Magazine and
The Power of Photography
A Virtual Tour
If you missed the exhibit of Life photography at the Princeton Art Museum last June, which you probably did
since it had to close almost as soon as it opened, with this virtual 28-minute tour conducted by the exhibit’s curator, Kate Brussard you can now take an in-depth look at the photography featured in Life magazine
throughout its weekly run from 1936 to 1972. From the Great Depression to the Vietnam War, the vast majority of the photographs printed and consumed in the United States appeared on the pages of magazines. Offering an in-depth look at the photography featured in Life magazine weekly run from 1936 to 1972, this exhibition examines how the magazine’s use of images fundamentally shaped the modern idea of photography in the United States. The exhibition included an array of materials, including caption files, contact sheets, and shooting scripts, shedding new light on the collaborative process behind now-iconic images and photo-essays.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/art/exhibitions/3612.
• • •
EXHIBITION
Life Magazine and
The Power of Photography
A Virtual Tour
If you missed the exhibit of Life photography at the Princeton Art Museum last June, which you probably did
since it had to close almost as soon as it opened, with this virtual 28-minute tour conducted by the exhibit’s curator, Kate Brussard you can now take an in-depth look at the photography featured in Life magazine
throughout its weekly run from 1936 to 1972. From the Great Depression to the Vietnam War, the vast majority of the photographs printed and consumed in the United States appeared on the pages of magazines. Offering an in-depth look at the photography featured in Life magazine weekly run from 1936 to 1972, this exhibition examines how the magazine’s use of images fundamentally shaped the modern idea of photography in the United States. The exhibition included an array of materials, including caption files, contact sheets, and shooting scripts, shedding new light on the collaborative process behind now-iconic images and photo-essays.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/art/exhibitions/3612.
• • •
The Hard Work Behind the Exhibit
by Jeremy Main
For those whose memory of Life may have dimmed—or perhaps those of a younger generation who never saw Life—the Princeton Art Museum organized an exhibit that is both scholarly and fascinating. It shows how much the spectacularly successful weekly shaped not only how photography came to be used but even how Americans thought about their country and the world. You can’t visit the exhibit now because COVID 19 closed it down almost as soon as it opened in June. But you can view it on line.
The exhibit represents the most thorough and scholarly examination of Life and its effect on society we have seen so far. The Life Picture Collection warehoused in Jersey City was scoured for its contents. Katherine Bussard, the Princeton museum’s photography curator, spent three and-a-half years organizing the exhibit, with much help from our archivist, Bill Hooper. Kristen Gresh of the Boston Museum of Fine Art, served as the co-curator. The exhibit was scheduled to go there next, but was cancelled. The photographers—“both celebrated and overlooked”—represented in the exhibit include among others: Margaret Bourke-White, Larry Burrows, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Frank Dandridge, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Fritz Goro, Gordon Parks and W. Eugene Smith.
To back up the exhibit, Kate Bussard produced a handsome volume, LIFE Magazine and The Power of Photography (Princeton Art Museum, $58 on Amazon) that includes many of the pictures exhibited plus essays by 30 scholars on the significance of Life.
A young Princeton graduate, Anna Mazarakis, Class of 2016, caught a sense of the enduring importance of Life in an article in the Princeton Alumni Weekly. She wrote: “Even if you were born after World War II, there’s a good chance you can clearly picture events of the time. The aerial views of the atomic bombs detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square after Japan surrendered. The view of Adolf Hitler’s bunker after he and Eva Braun committed suicide there.”
Kate Bussard writes, “To this day, iconic images are part of what give us a sense of the news and the happenings in our world.” At least until television came along, picture magazines, especially Life, helped shape Americans’ view of the world—admittedly a white, middle-class view.
Gordon Parks brought a black perspective to the magazine, beginning in 1948 when he shot a photo essay of a black gang leader in Harlem. He became a staff photographer and a film director, screenwriter, novelist and musician.
To give the public a closer look at how Life worked, Kate Bussard invited the public to listen to four of the people who knew the magazine intimately. Some 140 people showed up before the museum closed to listen to former Life photographer Henry Grossman, Marthe Smith, a picture researcher who created the Life Gallery of Photography, Life Reporter Irene Neves and archivist Hooper.
When Bussard invited the panelists to reminisce about their experiences at Life, Grossman related that when he was a freelance and took an excellent picture of Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion (which he sold to both Time and Newsweek) and showed it to Life he was told that if he wanted his work to run in the magazine rather than taking the perfect photo he should concentrate on a series of photos that would tell a story. The photo essay was one of Life’s singular features.
Hooper recalled that when he was in 2d grade back in 1962 growing up with Life (which was then a favorite of everybody in many families) he wanted to take a copy of the magazine for show-and-tell in his class. But the cover of that issue showed Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra and Hooper’s mother thought it a bit too racy for 2d graders.
During a Q-and-A, a native of Hong Kong recalled how much Life had affected her as a child. She remembered particularly the issue of Life that ran the pictures of all the American soldiers killed in a single week in Vietnam.
In a review of the exhibit, art critic Jonathan Keats wrote in Forbes about the “dramatic impact” of Life’s photo essay about “The Birth of a Baby,” which caused a sensation, partly because Time Inc. president Roy Larsen, who had argued for the story to draw attention to the magazine, was jailed—very briefly—for obscenity. The issue of Life was passed around an average of eight times so that it reached an estimated 12% of the population. This would not be important today 47 years after the death of the weekly Life, writes Keats “were Life not so profoundly influential as a precursor to our image-driven culture. The story of Life provides a prehistory of contemporary media, suggesting both the potential to enhance public dialogue and the risks of hidden influence on public opinion.”
In a comment on a picture of the D-Day landing in Normandy, Bussard writes of working for Life, “It’s incredibly high risk journalism. There’s not a moment where it feels like they’re standing to the side observing.” (Two Life photographers were killed in Vietnam.)
Liam Kennedy of University College in Dublin, writing in the Exhibition Catalog gives sort of an epitaph of the magazine: “an increasingly divided public no longer saw itself reflected in the pages of Life, and the magazine could not visually suture the divisions in the American worldview.” Television drew viewers and advertisers away from the magazine and it stopped publishing as a weekly in 1972. —posted 2/6/2021.
by Jeremy Main
For those whose memory of Life may have dimmed—or perhaps those of a younger generation who never saw Life—the Princeton Art Museum organized an exhibit that is both scholarly and fascinating. It shows how much the spectacularly successful weekly shaped not only how photography came to be used but even how Americans thought about their country and the world. You can’t visit the exhibit now because COVID 19 closed it down almost as soon as it opened in June. But you can view it on line.
The exhibit represents the most thorough and scholarly examination of Life and its effect on society we have seen so far. The Life Picture Collection warehoused in Jersey City was scoured for its contents. Katherine Bussard, the Princeton museum’s photography curator, spent three and-a-half years organizing the exhibit, with much help from our archivist, Bill Hooper. Kristen Gresh of the Boston Museum of Fine Art, served as the co-curator. The exhibit was scheduled to go there next, but was cancelled. The photographers—“both celebrated and overlooked”—represented in the exhibit include among others: Margaret Bourke-White, Larry Burrows, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Frank Dandridge, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Fritz Goro, Gordon Parks and W. Eugene Smith.
To back up the exhibit, Kate Bussard produced a handsome volume, LIFE Magazine and The Power of Photography (Princeton Art Museum, $58 on Amazon) that includes many of the pictures exhibited plus essays by 30 scholars on the significance of Life.
A young Princeton graduate, Anna Mazarakis, Class of 2016, caught a sense of the enduring importance of Life in an article in the Princeton Alumni Weekly. She wrote: “Even if you were born after World War II, there’s a good chance you can clearly picture events of the time. The aerial views of the atomic bombs detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square after Japan surrendered. The view of Adolf Hitler’s bunker after he and Eva Braun committed suicide there.”
Kate Bussard writes, “To this day, iconic images are part of what give us a sense of the news and the happenings in our world.” At least until television came along, picture magazines, especially Life, helped shape Americans’ view of the world—admittedly a white, middle-class view.
Gordon Parks brought a black perspective to the magazine, beginning in 1948 when he shot a photo essay of a black gang leader in Harlem. He became a staff photographer and a film director, screenwriter, novelist and musician.
To give the public a closer look at how Life worked, Kate Bussard invited the public to listen to four of the people who knew the magazine intimately. Some 140 people showed up before the museum closed to listen to former Life photographer Henry Grossman, Marthe Smith, a picture researcher who created the Life Gallery of Photography, Life Reporter Irene Neves and archivist Hooper.
When Bussard invited the panelists to reminisce about their experiences at Life, Grossman related that when he was a freelance and took an excellent picture of Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion (which he sold to both Time and Newsweek) and showed it to Life he was told that if he wanted his work to run in the magazine rather than taking the perfect photo he should concentrate on a series of photos that would tell a story. The photo essay was one of Life’s singular features.
Hooper recalled that when he was in 2d grade back in 1962 growing up with Life (which was then a favorite of everybody in many families) he wanted to take a copy of the magazine for show-and-tell in his class. But the cover of that issue showed Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra and Hooper’s mother thought it a bit too racy for 2d graders.
During a Q-and-A, a native of Hong Kong recalled how much Life had affected her as a child. She remembered particularly the issue of Life that ran the pictures of all the American soldiers killed in a single week in Vietnam.
In a review of the exhibit, art critic Jonathan Keats wrote in Forbes about the “dramatic impact” of Life’s photo essay about “The Birth of a Baby,” which caused a sensation, partly because Time Inc. president Roy Larsen, who had argued for the story to draw attention to the magazine, was jailed—very briefly—for obscenity. The issue of Life was passed around an average of eight times so that it reached an estimated 12% of the population. This would not be important today 47 years after the death of the weekly Life, writes Keats “were Life not so profoundly influential as a precursor to our image-driven culture. The story of Life provides a prehistory of contemporary media, suggesting both the potential to enhance public dialogue and the risks of hidden influence on public opinion.”
In a comment on a picture of the D-Day landing in Normandy, Bussard writes of working for Life, “It’s incredibly high risk journalism. There’s not a moment where it feels like they’re standing to the side observing.” (Two Life photographers were killed in Vietnam.)
Liam Kennedy of University College in Dublin, writing in the Exhibition Catalog gives sort of an epitaph of the magazine: “an increasingly divided public no longer saw itself reflected in the pages of Life, and the magazine could not visually suture the divisions in the American worldview.” Television drew viewers and advertisers away from the magazine and it stopped publishing as a weekly in 1972. —posted 2/6/2021.
• • •
—Summer 1969--
LIFE, The Moon and Woodstock
LIFE Magazine Special Issues documented two historic events
that happened within weeks of each other and altered how we see our world.
— Bob Essman recalls how the LIFE special issue on the Moon landing happened --
--Tim Allis interviews Irene Neves on how she and LIFE covered Woodstock. --
FYI: Neves began at Time Inc. in 1959, Essman in 1962.
—Summer 1969--
LIFE, The Moon and Woodstock
LIFE Magazine Special Issues documented two historic events
that happened within weeks of each other and altered how we see our world.
— Bob Essman recalls how the LIFE special issue on the Moon landing happened --
--Tim Allis interviews Irene Neves on how she and LIFE covered Woodstock. --
FYI: Neves began at Time Inc. in 1959, Essman in 1962.
To The Moon and Back! What a Trip!
by Bob Essman (Life, People)
In 1969, I was in my early 30s and a layout artist on LIFE. Ralph Graves was just taking over for the retiring ME George Hunt. Retired Art Director Bernard Quint had not yet been replaced. Phil Kunhardt asked me if I could temporarily take over some of Quint's special projects involving experimental inserts for the magazine and added one more, ideas to replace the famed “Miscellany” page. I was buried in all that, working with Eleanor Graves, Sally Kirkland, Quentin Fiore and others for a time when Phil and Loudon Wainwright asked if I would work with them to create a LIFE special issue on the upcoming Moon landing.
Needless to say, I was thrilled. For the next month we worked on repackaging several of the previously published articles about the program, the science and the astronaut’s families.
Along the way I asked about the comparative size of the rockets. The result was 8 pages of scale drawings and capsule information about the 31 Russian and American manned space rocket trips from the first Russian on Soyuz 1, April 12, 1961 through Apollo 11 on July 16, 1969.
The day after the Apollo 11 launch Ralph Morse’s spectacular pictures of the lift-off arrived. He had mounted a camera on the device that held the rocket as it took off. He joked about the cost of the camera lens that melted after it took the dozen or so closeup shots as Apollo II took off. That camera was on automatic while he was taking wide angle shots of the 3500 journalists who were watching it from a safe distance. Morse’s lift-off pictures made a spectacular spread followed by a picture of the excited press watching it from the stands. One of my concepts for replacing the popular “Miscellany” page became a six page photo essay of the World watching the landing on their TVs—including the Pope and the astronaut’s families.
My real fun began at 5:00 AM the day after the splashdown when our allotment of pictures from NASA arrived. We, very excitedly, went through the slides and made selects. One picture was very black except for a small glint of light in the middle. I figured it had to be something or NASA wouldn’t have sent it, so I asked George Karas to lighten it up. I went to my office with the pictures and about four hours later presented Phil and Louden with 31 pages and the covers. (That black picture, thanks to George, turned out to be a closeup of the plaque on the lunar lander that was left behind. It was perfect for us and it was published exclusively in our story.) Phil and Louden wrote captions, Dave Young and his crew marked up the layouts and at 3:00 PM the issue was on its way to the printer in Chicago. It hit the newsstands that Monday morning and I was told that the entire press run of one million copies sold out by the end of the day. This is an updated version of an article I wrote for the Fall 2009 issue of the printed TLAS newsletter about creating the special LIFE issue on the Moon Landing.
• • •
by Bob Essman (Life, People)
In 1969, I was in my early 30s and a layout artist on LIFE. Ralph Graves was just taking over for the retiring ME George Hunt. Retired Art Director Bernard Quint had not yet been replaced. Phil Kunhardt asked me if I could temporarily take over some of Quint's special projects involving experimental inserts for the magazine and added one more, ideas to replace the famed “Miscellany” page. I was buried in all that, working with Eleanor Graves, Sally Kirkland, Quentin Fiore and others for a time when Phil and Loudon Wainwright asked if I would work with them to create a LIFE special issue on the upcoming Moon landing.
Needless to say, I was thrilled. For the next month we worked on repackaging several of the previously published articles about the program, the science and the astronaut’s families.
Along the way I asked about the comparative size of the rockets. The result was 8 pages of scale drawings and capsule information about the 31 Russian and American manned space rocket trips from the first Russian on Soyuz 1, April 12, 1961 through Apollo 11 on July 16, 1969.
The day after the Apollo 11 launch Ralph Morse’s spectacular pictures of the lift-off arrived. He had mounted a camera on the device that held the rocket as it took off. He joked about the cost of the camera lens that melted after it took the dozen or so closeup shots as Apollo II took off. That camera was on automatic while he was taking wide angle shots of the 3500 journalists who were watching it from a safe distance. Morse’s lift-off pictures made a spectacular spread followed by a picture of the excited press watching it from the stands. One of my concepts for replacing the popular “Miscellany” page became a six page photo essay of the World watching the landing on their TVs—including the Pope and the astronaut’s families.
My real fun began at 5:00 AM the day after the splashdown when our allotment of pictures from NASA arrived. We, very excitedly, went through the slides and made selects. One picture was very black except for a small glint of light in the middle. I figured it had to be something or NASA wouldn’t have sent it, so I asked George Karas to lighten it up. I went to my office with the pictures and about four hours later presented Phil and Louden with 31 pages and the covers. (That black picture, thanks to George, turned out to be a closeup of the plaque on the lunar lander that was left behind. It was perfect for us and it was published exclusively in our story.) Phil and Louden wrote captions, Dave Young and his crew marked up the layouts and at 3:00 PM the issue was on its way to the printer in Chicago. It hit the newsstands that Monday morning and I was told that the entire press run of one million copies sold out by the end of the day. This is an updated version of an article I wrote for the Fall 2009 issue of the printed TLAS newsletter about creating the special LIFE issue on the Moon Landing.
• • •
When LIFE Was Going Up the Country
For reporter Irene Neves the Woodstock Festival was far more than far out
By Tim Allis (People, InStyle)
In 1965, as a copy reader segueing into reporting who was assigned to both Winston Churchill’s funeral and the first-ever papal visit to the United States, Irene Neves witnessed “the power of Life magazine, the immensity of its resources in covering stories.”
For Churchill's Funeral she had flown with the large team that put the story together—writing, developing film, designing layouts, editing—literally in mid-air from a retrofitted plane racing back to New York on deadline. For Pope Paul VI’s visit, the weekly “blanketed the city with coverage” and Neves and photographer Francis Miller found themselves leaning out of a window of the corset department at Saks Fifth Avenue as His Holiness arrived at St. Patrick’s. “We had to let the police know our plans in advance so they wouldn’t think we were snipers.”
By contrast, covering the Woodstock music festival for Life 50 years ago this August, recalls Irene, “was nothing like that.” The team consisted of just three reporters—Neves, John Stickney and leader Roger Vaughan, the deputy senior editor of the Youth and Culture department—and two photographers: Bill Eppridge, who had made a splash with his Life expose of middle-class heroin addiction in New York’s “Needle Park,” and John Dominis, later famous for photographing African wildlife.
In fact the Life brass might not have assigned the story at all if not for gently aggressive campaigning by Vaughan. “He had an eye and ear for the counterculture,” says Neves, “and he went to the editors and said ‘I think this is going to be big.’ And they said ‘No.’ Then he waited and went back and said, ‘I think you’re making a mistake.’ At almost the last minute they reluctantly said, ‘Oh go ahead,’ and we swung into action.”
Neves, who later worked at People as Deputy Chief of Reporters, has no recollection of a master strategy once her posse got to the sprawling and chaotic site on Max Yasgur’s farm. “I don’t think we had a game plan. It was just: find anything of interest. We went with the flow.” Unusual for Life’s standard operating procedure, they rarely saw the photographers who were out following their own instincts “and whipping around on dirt bikes.”
Unlike the nearly half-million concertgoers who by day two of the three-day fest were up to their love beads in mud, Vaughan, Stickney and Neves operated from the relatively deluxe comfort of a Dodge motor home that Stickney had rented and stocked with food, and which they parked in a pasture behind the stage. “When we arrived on Thursday it was all open and we just said, ‘Well, this spot looks good.”
Quickly though Irene and the team were agog at “the stream of travelers [who] became a river,” as she wrote in her file at the time. Later, as her dispatch reports, “As darkness came, the hill used for the camping site of first arrivals expanded with the light of campfires, from hour to hour growing larger, and still the people poured in, filling the road from ditch to ditch, making it almost impossible for the trucks carrying the needed equipment and supplies to move.”
Neves saw that the organizers were in a near panic. “Everything was frantic. And they knew more people were coming than they had sold tickets for, with the realization that they had lost control of the festival,” which at that point became free.
From her files:
“Behind the scenes . . .phones jangled constantly. Calls for tow trucks, calls from mothers looking for runaway kids, rock groups calling to say they wouldn’t be ready in time to meet the helicopter . . . complaints from townspeople, offers of aid from townspeople. P.R. people were ducking members of the press. Too many passes had been given out; there was no way to accommodate the requests for more. . . On Thursday a press card could get a reporter just about anywhere. By Friday a plain press card was almost useless; one needed one with two stars. By Saturday, even the press cards one step higher—those with ‘bullsh-t’ stamped on them—weren’t much help against the mud underfoot.”
Still the Life team had virtual free rein, including in the VIP area behind the stage where Neves saw beat poet Allen Ginsberg chatting with Wavy Gravy of the Hog Farm. Elsewhere activists like Abbie Hoffman were part of what was dubbed Movement City, a micro encampment of cause groups well-remembered (SDS) and long-forgotten (the Motherf--ckers). The Merry Pranksters' bus had made the trip and declared everyone's collective destination: "further."
In her file, which she began composing on site on a portable Olivetti typewriter, Neves at times referred to festival goers as “long hairs” and “kids.” The word “hippie,” however, does not appear. “Hippies were called hippies, hippies did not call themselves hippies,” she says. “Often it was a pejorative like ‘dirty hippies’ or ‘drug-crazed hippies.’ The word is much more in vogue now than it was then. Then it was a label.”
When she wasn’t interviewing Yasgur, tracking production dramas or chatting with concertgoers on the ridge of the vast bowl, Neves had a virtual front row seat to the show—positioned between the crowd and the stage on a narrow raised platform reserved for the press. She saw Janis Joplin, bottle of booze in hand; The Who “with Roger Daltrey’s fringe swirling,” and “the super cool” Jefferson Airplane. “Some other reporter said, ‘See that briefcase? That’s where they carry their dope.’ It was all right there just a few feet away. I saw one great act after another. It was thrilling.” And a natural high—she says she and the team didn’t inhale. “I think in our private lives we smoked, but not for a gig. We had to do notes and stuff, we couldn’t be stoned.”
Irene was standing in the VIP area at 2 AM, where Joan Baez was waiting to go on to close out the first night of the festival. “I’d met her before so we said hello and caught up a little and as she headed toward the stage I asked, ‘Can I come with you?’ So I crossed the bridge that separated the holding area from the stage with Joan and her band. That’s the only time I was right on the stage platform. Mainly I was watching her perform and seeing the crowd react to her.”
Again from her files:
“As Baez said before she sang the anthem of a past age: ‘We Shall Overcome,’—‘I would like to sing a song that strikes many people as naive.’ It was this naiveté, the flower power and kindness, love and peacefulness that competed with the confusion and fear of a possible violent outbreak, that eventually became the dominant feeling of the weekend.”
The Life team, too, caught the good vibrations. “It was a very divided era, with a lot of acrimony especially because of the Vietnam war,” says Neves now. “But then this thing happened. And it just unfolded before you. And you saw people coming together, helping each other and having a good time. This spirit of togetherness took over and it was so refreshing. Of course we got swept up in it.”
At the end of the long third and final night an exhausted Neves headed back to the motor home to get some sleep just as Jimi Hendrix launched into his now-legendary electric rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner.” Monday’s dawn was breaking and, Irene recalls: “I felt like he was sort of sending me home.” The Life gang made it back to the city that day and immediately began closing the 10-page lead story for that week’s issue. By then Woodstock was international news and the editors had decided to start preparing a special issue to quickly follow.
Fifty years and several ersatz Woodstock re-dos have come and gone. And again we live in a fractious time. Neves is still in touch with Roger Vaughan who shared this perspective with her:
“Those of us who bought into ‘the Movement,’” writes Vaughan, “loosely defined as a kinder, simpler, more loving way to live, had visions of a better world coming to pass thanks to amazing technological advances combined with a more generous outlook. But many were the detractors. . . I don't remember much about the music at Woodstock. I didn't hear much of it. But I remember the volunteers in the tent where injured people were being taken care of, including those on bad drug trips. People on all sides went out of their way to be helpful when they weren't dancing or having fun.” Troubled by the current state of the nation and a culture of greed, Roger allows that “if peace and love ever return, some of its roots will have been set 50 years ago on a rainy weekend at Max Yasgur's farm.”
For Irene, the passing of decades has only reinforced what a special experience she and several hundred thousand believers had. “I think everybody felt lucky to be there,” she says. “The reporting team was no different. It was one of the great assignments of my time at Life.”
For reporter Irene Neves the Woodstock Festival was far more than far out
By Tim Allis (People, InStyle)
In 1965, as a copy reader segueing into reporting who was assigned to both Winston Churchill’s funeral and the first-ever papal visit to the United States, Irene Neves witnessed “the power of Life magazine, the immensity of its resources in covering stories.”
For Churchill's Funeral she had flown with the large team that put the story together—writing, developing film, designing layouts, editing—literally in mid-air from a retrofitted plane racing back to New York on deadline. For Pope Paul VI’s visit, the weekly “blanketed the city with coverage” and Neves and photographer Francis Miller found themselves leaning out of a window of the corset department at Saks Fifth Avenue as His Holiness arrived at St. Patrick’s. “We had to let the police know our plans in advance so they wouldn’t think we were snipers.”
By contrast, covering the Woodstock music festival for Life 50 years ago this August, recalls Irene, “was nothing like that.” The team consisted of just three reporters—Neves, John Stickney and leader Roger Vaughan, the deputy senior editor of the Youth and Culture department—and two photographers: Bill Eppridge, who had made a splash with his Life expose of middle-class heroin addiction in New York’s “Needle Park,” and John Dominis, later famous for photographing African wildlife.
In fact the Life brass might not have assigned the story at all if not for gently aggressive campaigning by Vaughan. “He had an eye and ear for the counterculture,” says Neves, “and he went to the editors and said ‘I think this is going to be big.’ And they said ‘No.’ Then he waited and went back and said, ‘I think you’re making a mistake.’ At almost the last minute they reluctantly said, ‘Oh go ahead,’ and we swung into action.”
Neves, who later worked at People as Deputy Chief of Reporters, has no recollection of a master strategy once her posse got to the sprawling and chaotic site on Max Yasgur’s farm. “I don’t think we had a game plan. It was just: find anything of interest. We went with the flow.” Unusual for Life’s standard operating procedure, they rarely saw the photographers who were out following their own instincts “and whipping around on dirt bikes.”
Unlike the nearly half-million concertgoers who by day two of the three-day fest were up to their love beads in mud, Vaughan, Stickney and Neves operated from the relatively deluxe comfort of a Dodge motor home that Stickney had rented and stocked with food, and which they parked in a pasture behind the stage. “When we arrived on Thursday it was all open and we just said, ‘Well, this spot looks good.”
Quickly though Irene and the team were agog at “the stream of travelers [who] became a river,” as she wrote in her file at the time. Later, as her dispatch reports, “As darkness came, the hill used for the camping site of first arrivals expanded with the light of campfires, from hour to hour growing larger, and still the people poured in, filling the road from ditch to ditch, making it almost impossible for the trucks carrying the needed equipment and supplies to move.”
Neves saw that the organizers were in a near panic. “Everything was frantic. And they knew more people were coming than they had sold tickets for, with the realization that they had lost control of the festival,” which at that point became free.
From her files:
“Behind the scenes . . .phones jangled constantly. Calls for tow trucks, calls from mothers looking for runaway kids, rock groups calling to say they wouldn’t be ready in time to meet the helicopter . . . complaints from townspeople, offers of aid from townspeople. P.R. people were ducking members of the press. Too many passes had been given out; there was no way to accommodate the requests for more. . . On Thursday a press card could get a reporter just about anywhere. By Friday a plain press card was almost useless; one needed one with two stars. By Saturday, even the press cards one step higher—those with ‘bullsh-t’ stamped on them—weren’t much help against the mud underfoot.”
Still the Life team had virtual free rein, including in the VIP area behind the stage where Neves saw beat poet Allen Ginsberg chatting with Wavy Gravy of the Hog Farm. Elsewhere activists like Abbie Hoffman were part of what was dubbed Movement City, a micro encampment of cause groups well-remembered (SDS) and long-forgotten (the Motherf--ckers). The Merry Pranksters' bus had made the trip and declared everyone's collective destination: "further."
In her file, which she began composing on site on a portable Olivetti typewriter, Neves at times referred to festival goers as “long hairs” and “kids.” The word “hippie,” however, does not appear. “Hippies were called hippies, hippies did not call themselves hippies,” she says. “Often it was a pejorative like ‘dirty hippies’ or ‘drug-crazed hippies.’ The word is much more in vogue now than it was then. Then it was a label.”
When she wasn’t interviewing Yasgur, tracking production dramas or chatting with concertgoers on the ridge of the vast bowl, Neves had a virtual front row seat to the show—positioned between the crowd and the stage on a narrow raised platform reserved for the press. She saw Janis Joplin, bottle of booze in hand; The Who “with Roger Daltrey’s fringe swirling,” and “the super cool” Jefferson Airplane. “Some other reporter said, ‘See that briefcase? That’s where they carry their dope.’ It was all right there just a few feet away. I saw one great act after another. It was thrilling.” And a natural high—she says she and the team didn’t inhale. “I think in our private lives we smoked, but not for a gig. We had to do notes and stuff, we couldn’t be stoned.”
Irene was standing in the VIP area at 2 AM, where Joan Baez was waiting to go on to close out the first night of the festival. “I’d met her before so we said hello and caught up a little and as she headed toward the stage I asked, ‘Can I come with you?’ So I crossed the bridge that separated the holding area from the stage with Joan and her band. That’s the only time I was right on the stage platform. Mainly I was watching her perform and seeing the crowd react to her.”
Again from her files:
“As Baez said before she sang the anthem of a past age: ‘We Shall Overcome,’—‘I would like to sing a song that strikes many people as naive.’ It was this naiveté, the flower power and kindness, love and peacefulness that competed with the confusion and fear of a possible violent outbreak, that eventually became the dominant feeling of the weekend.”
The Life team, too, caught the good vibrations. “It was a very divided era, with a lot of acrimony especially because of the Vietnam war,” says Neves now. “But then this thing happened. And it just unfolded before you. And you saw people coming together, helping each other and having a good time. This spirit of togetherness took over and it was so refreshing. Of course we got swept up in it.”
At the end of the long third and final night an exhausted Neves headed back to the motor home to get some sleep just as Jimi Hendrix launched into his now-legendary electric rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner.” Monday’s dawn was breaking and, Irene recalls: “I felt like he was sort of sending me home.” The Life gang made it back to the city that day and immediately began closing the 10-page lead story for that week’s issue. By then Woodstock was international news and the editors had decided to start preparing a special issue to quickly follow.
Fifty years and several ersatz Woodstock re-dos have come and gone. And again we live in a fractious time. Neves is still in touch with Roger Vaughan who shared this perspective with her:
“Those of us who bought into ‘the Movement,’” writes Vaughan, “loosely defined as a kinder, simpler, more loving way to live, had visions of a better world coming to pass thanks to amazing technological advances combined with a more generous outlook. But many were the detractors. . . I don't remember much about the music at Woodstock. I didn't hear much of it. But I remember the volunteers in the tent where injured people were being taken care of, including those on bad drug trips. People on all sides went out of their way to be helpful when they weren't dancing or having fun.” Troubled by the current state of the nation and a culture of greed, Roger allows that “if peace and love ever return, some of its roots will have been set 50 years ago on a rainy weekend at Max Yasgur's farm.”
For Irene, the passing of decades has only reinforced what a special experience she and several hundred thousand believers had. “I think everybody felt lucky to be there,” she says. “The reporting team was no different. It was one of the great assignments of my time at Life.”
• • •
The Legacy Lives On!
Ed Strauss sent the pictures below and reports the Time Inc Gallery’s return at the New-York Historical Society with a brand-new exhibition on the first floor titled: Time Inc and Civil Rights.
For the editors of LIFE—the first magazine to tell stories with photographs rather than text—the camera was not merely a reporter, but also a potent commentator with the power to frame news and events for a popular audience. For decades, Americans saw the world through the lens of the magazine’s photographers. Yet between the 1930s and the early 1970s, LIFE kept only six women photographers on staff. Currently an exhibit called "LIFE’s Women" continues until October 6. It features more than 80 images showcasing the extraordinary work by those six photographers: Margaret Bourke-White, Hansel Mieth, Marie Hansen, Martha Holmes, Nina Leen, and Lisa Larsen. The exhibit reveals these photographers’ important role in creating modern photojournalism and defining what editor-in-chief Henry Luce described as "The American Century.”
The Society is open from 10 AM to 6 PM on weekdays except Mondays and 11 to 5 on Sundays. It is located at 170 Central Park West, just north of 76th Street. Go see these exhibits —Posted July 14, 2019
For the editors of LIFE—the first magazine to tell stories with photographs rather than text—the camera was not merely a reporter, but also a potent commentator with the power to frame news and events for a popular audience. For decades, Americans saw the world through the lens of the magazine’s photographers. Yet between the 1930s and the early 1970s, LIFE kept only six women photographers on staff. Currently an exhibit called "LIFE’s Women" continues until October 6. It features more than 80 images showcasing the extraordinary work by those six photographers: Margaret Bourke-White, Hansel Mieth, Marie Hansen, Martha Holmes, Nina Leen, and Lisa Larsen. The exhibit reveals these photographers’ important role in creating modern photojournalism and defining what editor-in-chief Henry Luce described as "The American Century.”
The Society is open from 10 AM to 6 PM on weekdays except Mondays and 11 to 5 on Sundays. It is located at 170 Central Park West, just north of 76th Street. Go see these exhibits —Posted July 14, 2019
Time Magazine Gets New Owners
New York September 17, 2018: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and his wife Lynne Benioff bought Time for $190 million from Meredith Corp. Details below. . .
Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce, a cloud computing company, and his wife Lynne have agreed to buy Time magazine (or brand, if you prefer) from Meredith Corporation for $190 million. The news of the sale was broken by The Wall Street Journal on September 16 and confirmed immediately by Meredith and Edward Felsenthal, Time’s managing editor.
The announcement ended nearly ten months of speculation and worry about what would happen to Time after Meredith’s purchase of Time Inc. for $2.8 billion in January. Meredith continues to negotiate the sales of three of the other magazines that it acquired: Fortune, Money and Sports Illustrated.
Felsenthal said “one of the first challenges that Marc and Lynne gave us is to think big, really big. Beyond the five-year plan, what will Time look like in 2040? What will it mean to people decades from now. That’s what we will all be thinking about as we create a new home for Time rooted in what we know how to do so well.”
Benioff told The Wall Street Journal that Time is “an incredibly strong business.” Time has been badly damaged by a huge losses in advertising, but has cut costs and circulation and has grown its digital business. Felsenthal said Time “is solidly profitable.”
The announcement ended nearly ten months of speculation and worry about what would happen to Time after Meredith’s purchase of Time Inc. for $2.8 billion in January. Meredith continues to negotiate the sales of three of the other magazines that it acquired: Fortune, Money and Sports Illustrated.
Felsenthal said “one of the first challenges that Marc and Lynne gave us is to think big, really big. Beyond the five-year plan, what will Time look like in 2040? What will it mean to people decades from now. That’s what we will all be thinking about as we create a new home for Time rooted in what we know how to do so well.”
Benioff told The Wall Street Journal that Time is “an incredibly strong business.” Time has been badly damaged by a huge losses in advertising, but has cut costs and circulation and has grown its digital business. Felsenthal said Time “is solidly profitable.”
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Remembering the Golden Years
Compiled by Jeremy Main
While we wait to hear who will buy Time and the other magazines that Meredith wants to discard, we are getting more than a few reminiscences about Time Inc. in the golden years of magazines when we were at the top of the heap—and we are getting some thanks for keeping TLAS going.
• Eugene Light, who used to edit this newsletter, writes: “The photos of the Time Inc. sign being replaced by the Meredith sign in the last newsletter were heartbreaking. It brought back many memories....1958...waiting at the "fishbowl" to go to lunch at the 3G's restaurant with coworkers. The 60's...working with the acclaimed Carky Rubens and all the gregarious Life ad salesmen...the wonderful conventions, the generous expense accounts...designing promotion pieces and the slide show "The Beat of Life" then touring it around the country....flying to Churchill's funeral to shoot a "How Life gets the story" promotion brochure...going to Nicaragua for a story about the charity "Project Hope"....the 1970's....the great Managing Editor Ralph Graves brought me into the editorial department...the creativity, the exceptional photographers, the writers, editors, the photo lab and crew, the fantastic picture collection, the late closing nights...the thrill of designing the cover for the Life in Pictures 1971 issue and then using the same design in 1972 for the final issue and sneaking "goodbye" into the corner for the brilliant editor Dick Stolley—1986—designing the book Fifty Years of Life with the wonderful editor Phil Kunhardt. Those who were there those years will know what I'm trying to say. It was a wondrous era sadly never to be repeated. Now in my eighties, I think back of those years and count myself truly lucky to have been part of it.”
The New York Times ran an unusually long piece of reminiscenses covering nearly three pages of the Sunday business section on May 20 under the headline “The End of a Media Dynasty.” The subhead was “An oral history of how the once-dominant Time Inc. ended up on the scrap heap.” The body of the article consisted of 38 quotations obtained from former editorial people, including some of the most prominent, such as Dick Stolley, Norman Pearlstine and Maureen Dowd.
Unfortunately, either because of the questions asked or the quotes selected, the quotes dealt mostly with matters such as the famous drink carts, the office affairs, the vast expense accounts, the miserable treatment of women until very late. All of these things were true, but they missed the larger point that in spite of these excesses Time Inc. produced a great deal of fine work that for much of the 20th century and for the beginning of the 21st had enormous reach and influence.
• Ying Sita (also known as Princess Ying Sita in her former home in Burma) encountered the free-wheeling days of yore when Time Inc. president Jim Linen blew into Bangkok in 1965. Linen loved to travel, mix with royalty and make grand gestures. He valued the friendship of the Shah of Iran and of the King and Queen of Thailand. He supported generously the Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand, and bought the ailing newspaper The Bangkok Post (which became a hugely profitable investment, for reasons unfathomable at this distance). He also picked five young people, including Ying, to come and spend a year in the U.S. Time-Life Broadcast hosted her and sent her to some of their TV stations around the country. She emigrated to the U.S. in 1970 and worked for various Time Inc. publications until 2001. When she was at People, Wednesday was her day off and she would take an early bus to Washington to lobby for aid to refugees from Burma. She succeeded in establishing the Burma America Fund with legal help from Scooter Libby and $1 million from Congress.
• Another reminiscence comes from an unlikely source, a glossy magazine published by the Shell Point retirement community near Fort Myers. A recent issue featured one of those legendary ad salesmen who made so much money for the company that the rest of us could spend so liberally. Bruce McNaughton learned to drive on a Model T Ford when he was 11 years old and forever has loved cars, especially imported cars. At Business Week he was the first to sell an ad in a business publication for an imported car.
When he moved to Fortune, which previously had not run imported car ads, he dominated the field with flash and hard work. He created The Bash held annually in the Hemisphere Club. CEOs and ad managers filled the room and Bruce entered, in kilts with bagpipes playing. He also instituted the Fortune Golfing Association. He would fly his top clients and their wives to Bermuda for a long weekend of golfing and socializing. Behind the flash, though, there was a lot of hard work, getting to know his clients as well as they themselves did, and taking “no” as the starting point of a negotiation. Bruce retired from Fortune but served as consultant there and at other magazines. He is listed as “senior advisor, autos” on the Inc. masthead.
• Bob Essman writes: "Shortly after my 33rd birthday in 1969, I was sitting at my desk in the northwest corner of the LIFE layout room when Phil Kunhardt and Loudon Wainwright, Jr. walked up and asked me if I had time to join them for a meeting. I was reluctant to leave without finishing what was on my desk, but was assured that the then new ME Ralph Graves made the request. We went to Phil’s office in the opposite corner of the building and they asked me if I’d be willing to take on a special project, kind of between things. Sure, I said in a very unsure way. For the next several months I completed an experimental project for the magazine while remaking the several already published stories about the people and science involved in the pending landing on the Moon. In the 24 hours after the astronauts returned from their incredible journey, I processed the moon pictures from NASA into 16 pages and a cover while Louden and Phil were busy writing the stories and captions. After a very long Friday, the issue was sent to press and it was on the newsstands that Monday morning. I went on to become Art Director of SHOW, Business Week, The New York City Bicentennial and returned to Time Inc as Art Director of People in 1974. I was lucky to be there then! (We noted that Bob’s Moon landing issue cover was among the selected covers illustrating the recent NYTimes story about the company. --Ed)
• We are receiving family reminiscenses too. Kelly Black Windsor, whose father and grandfather worked for Time Inc., emailed us from Santa Rosa that she “grew up on stories of Henry Luce, Ed Thompson and Jim White, and the great party for all the Time Inc. cover subjects.” Her grandfather, Howard Black joined Time Inc. in 1924 and eventually became a board member and the executive vice president in charge of advertising. Her father, Tom Black was a sales rep for Life and Time and in 1970 followed Thompson to help found Smithsonian magazine. A framed copy of Smithsonian’s first cover hung over Howard’s regular table at “21”. Kelly writes to thank us “for the joy the TL Alumni Society had brought to our family over the years.” Kelly went into the advertising business and now teaches advertising at Santa Rosa junior college. •
• Eugene Light, who used to edit this newsletter, writes: “The photos of the Time Inc. sign being replaced by the Meredith sign in the last newsletter were heartbreaking. It brought back many memories....1958...waiting at the "fishbowl" to go to lunch at the 3G's restaurant with coworkers. The 60's...working with the acclaimed Carky Rubens and all the gregarious Life ad salesmen...the wonderful conventions, the generous expense accounts...designing promotion pieces and the slide show "The Beat of Life" then touring it around the country....flying to Churchill's funeral to shoot a "How Life gets the story" promotion brochure...going to Nicaragua for a story about the charity "Project Hope"....the 1970's....the great Managing Editor Ralph Graves brought me into the editorial department...the creativity, the exceptional photographers, the writers, editors, the photo lab and crew, the fantastic picture collection, the late closing nights...the thrill of designing the cover for the Life in Pictures 1971 issue and then using the same design in 1972 for the final issue and sneaking "goodbye" into the corner for the brilliant editor Dick Stolley—1986—designing the book Fifty Years of Life with the wonderful editor Phil Kunhardt. Those who were there those years will know what I'm trying to say. It was a wondrous era sadly never to be repeated. Now in my eighties, I think back of those years and count myself truly lucky to have been part of it.”
The New York Times ran an unusually long piece of reminiscenses covering nearly three pages of the Sunday business section on May 20 under the headline “The End of a Media Dynasty.” The subhead was “An oral history of how the once-dominant Time Inc. ended up on the scrap heap.” The body of the article consisted of 38 quotations obtained from former editorial people, including some of the most prominent, such as Dick Stolley, Norman Pearlstine and Maureen Dowd.
Unfortunately, either because of the questions asked or the quotes selected, the quotes dealt mostly with matters such as the famous drink carts, the office affairs, the vast expense accounts, the miserable treatment of women until very late. All of these things were true, but they missed the larger point that in spite of these excesses Time Inc. produced a great deal of fine work that for much of the 20th century and for the beginning of the 21st had enormous reach and influence.
• Ying Sita (also known as Princess Ying Sita in her former home in Burma) encountered the free-wheeling days of yore when Time Inc. president Jim Linen blew into Bangkok in 1965. Linen loved to travel, mix with royalty and make grand gestures. He valued the friendship of the Shah of Iran and of the King and Queen of Thailand. He supported generously the Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand, and bought the ailing newspaper The Bangkok Post (which became a hugely profitable investment, for reasons unfathomable at this distance). He also picked five young people, including Ying, to come and spend a year in the U.S. Time-Life Broadcast hosted her and sent her to some of their TV stations around the country. She emigrated to the U.S. in 1970 and worked for various Time Inc. publications until 2001. When she was at People, Wednesday was her day off and she would take an early bus to Washington to lobby for aid to refugees from Burma. She succeeded in establishing the Burma America Fund with legal help from Scooter Libby and $1 million from Congress.
• Another reminiscence comes from an unlikely source, a glossy magazine published by the Shell Point retirement community near Fort Myers. A recent issue featured one of those legendary ad salesmen who made so much money for the company that the rest of us could spend so liberally. Bruce McNaughton learned to drive on a Model T Ford when he was 11 years old and forever has loved cars, especially imported cars. At Business Week he was the first to sell an ad in a business publication for an imported car.
When he moved to Fortune, which previously had not run imported car ads, he dominated the field with flash and hard work. He created The Bash held annually in the Hemisphere Club. CEOs and ad managers filled the room and Bruce entered, in kilts with bagpipes playing. He also instituted the Fortune Golfing Association. He would fly his top clients and their wives to Bermuda for a long weekend of golfing and socializing. Behind the flash, though, there was a lot of hard work, getting to know his clients as well as they themselves did, and taking “no” as the starting point of a negotiation. Bruce retired from Fortune but served as consultant there and at other magazines. He is listed as “senior advisor, autos” on the Inc. masthead.
• Bob Essman writes: "Shortly after my 33rd birthday in 1969, I was sitting at my desk in the northwest corner of the LIFE layout room when Phil Kunhardt and Loudon Wainwright, Jr. walked up and asked me if I had time to join them for a meeting. I was reluctant to leave without finishing what was on my desk, but was assured that the then new ME Ralph Graves made the request. We went to Phil’s office in the opposite corner of the building and they asked me if I’d be willing to take on a special project, kind of between things. Sure, I said in a very unsure way. For the next several months I completed an experimental project for the magazine while remaking the several already published stories about the people and science involved in the pending landing on the Moon. In the 24 hours after the astronauts returned from their incredible journey, I processed the moon pictures from NASA into 16 pages and a cover while Louden and Phil were busy writing the stories and captions. After a very long Friday, the issue was sent to press and it was on the newsstands that Monday morning. I went on to become Art Director of SHOW, Business Week, The New York City Bicentennial and returned to Time Inc as Art Director of People in 1974. I was lucky to be there then! (We noted that Bob’s Moon landing issue cover was among the selected covers illustrating the recent NYTimes story about the company. --Ed)
• We are receiving family reminiscenses too. Kelly Black Windsor, whose father and grandfather worked for Time Inc., emailed us from Santa Rosa that she “grew up on stories of Henry Luce, Ed Thompson and Jim White, and the great party for all the Time Inc. cover subjects.” Her grandfather, Howard Black joined Time Inc. in 1924 and eventually became a board member and the executive vice president in charge of advertising. Her father, Tom Black was a sales rep for Life and Time and in 1970 followed Thompson to help found Smithsonian magazine. A framed copy of Smithsonian’s first cover hung over Howard’s regular table at “21”. Kelly writes to thank us “for the joy the TL Alumni Society had brought to our family over the years.” Kelly went into the advertising business and now teaches advertising at Santa Rosa junior college. •