Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (69 page)

Reader’s Digest
: 1922, New York

The son of a Presbyterian minister from St. Paul, Minnesota, DeWitt Wallace had an idea for a small family digest that might at best earn him five thousand dollars a year. He believed that people wished to be well informed, but that no reader in 1920 had the time or money to read the scores of magazines issued weekly. Wallace proposed to sift out the most noteworthy articles, condense them for easy reading, and gather them into a handy periodical the size of a novella.

From back issues of other magazines, Wallace prepared his dummy. Two hundred copies of the prototype, already named
Reader’s Digest
, were mailed to New York publishers and other potential backers. No one expressed the least interest. So Wallace and his fiancée, Lila Bell Acheson, the daughter
of another Presbyterian minister, rented an office in New York’s Greenwich Village and formed the Reader’s Digest Association. They condensed magazine articles, and prepared a mimeographed circular soliciting subscriptions, which they mailed to several thousand people on their wedding day, October 15, 1921. When they returned from their honeymoon two weeks later, the Wallaces found they had fifteen hundred charter subscribers at three dollars each. They then set to work on issue number one of
Reader’s Digest
, dated February 1922.

With success came an unanticipated problem.

At first, other magazines readily granted the
Digest
permission to reprint articles without fees. It was publicity. But as circulation increased, the
Digest
was suddenly viewed as a competitor, cannibalizing copy and cutting into advertising revenue and readership. Soon many of the country’s major magazines refused the Wallaces reprint rights.

In 1933, to maintain the appearance of a digest, DeWitt Wallace instituted a controversial practice. He commissioned and paid for original articles to be written for other magazines, with the proviso that he be permitted to publish excerpts. Critics lambasted them as “planted articles,” while Wallace more benignly called them “cooperatively planned.” Magazines with small budgets welcomed the articles, but larger publications accused Wallace of threatening the free flow of ideas and determining the content of too many publications. The practice was discontinued in the 1950s. By that time, the wholesome family digest that praised a life of neighborliness and good works was earning thirty million dollars a year, and had recently launched a new venture, the Reader’s Digest Condensed Book Club. In the next decade, its circulation would climb to fifteen million readers.

TV Guide
: 1953, Pennsylvania

The magazine that would achieve a weekly circulation of seventeen million readers and change the way Americans watched television was born out of a telephone conversation.

In November 1952, Merrill Panitt, a television columnist for the
Philadelphia Inquirer
and an administrative assistant at Triangle Publications, received a phone call from his employer at Triangle, Walter H. Annenberg. The influential businessman had spotted a newspaper advertisement for a new weekly magazine,
TV Digest
. Annenberg instructed Panitt to learn more about the proposed publication and discover if there were any others like it around the country. Before that phone call was concluded, Annenberg had convinced himself to publish a national television magazine with local program listings. By the time he had hung up, he had laid out in principle what was to become one of America’s top-selling periodicals.

Panitt learned that local television magazines existed in at least New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Annenberg moved quickly
to acquire these publications, while contemplating what to name his own venture.

Panitt began the work of assembling a national editorial staff. Since there was no reservoir of stories or photos to fall back on, assignments were issued quickly. Red Smith, later to win a Pulitzer Prize, was hired to contribute a regular sports column.

At the Philadelphia headquarters, the editors had no trouble in deciding whom to put on their first cover. There had never been a television show as popular as
I Love Lucy
. It was a national phenomenon. President Eisenhower delayed an address to the nation rather than run against
Lucy
, and since the show aired on the night America’s department stores remained opened till nine-thirty, stores across the country installed television sets, hoping to win back shoppers who were staying home by the tens of thousands rather than miss their favorite program. Since the entire country had followed Lucy’s pregnancy and her baby’s birth on television, the editors decided to highlight the baby, Desidero Alberto Arnaz IV, and to place Lucy’s familiar face in the magazine’s upper-right-hand corner.

TV Guide
made its debut in April 1953, in ten different editions, with regional program listings. Although that first issue was a resounding success, weekly circulation began a strange and unanticipated decline. No one at the new publication had taken into account a social practice of the ’50s: With the majority of American homes lacking air-conditioning, television viewing declined precipitously in the summer months, while families opted for outdoor recreation, even if it was only to rock on the front porch to catch a breeze.

With the approach of fall, the circulation of
TV Guide
rose steadily, and the editors made an innovative move in devoting one issue to the shows scheduled for the new 1953–54 season. That first Fall Preview Issue sold out at newsstands and supermarkets and started a tradition. In fact, the annual Fall Preview quickly became
TV Guide’s
biggest issue in advertising revenue and circulation. Today, headquartered in Radnor, Pennsylvania, the magazine publishes 108 local editions, covering every state but Alaska.

Time
: 1923, New York

Almost titled
Chance
or
Destiny
, the most popular news weekly in the history of publishing,
Time
, sprang out of a close collegiate friendship between two extraordinarily different men.

Briton Hadden, born in Brooklyn in 1898 of well-to-do parents, had shown an interest in journalism since childhood, when he entertained his family with poems and stories and his classmates with a newspaper, the
Daily Glonk
. He secured his first professional writing position, with the
New York World
, after informing its editor, who had tried to dismiss him, “You’re interfering with my destiny.”

Whereas Hadden was extroverted and prankish, Henry Luce was serious
and pragmatic. He was the son of a Presbyterian missionary who had founded two American universities in China, where Luce was born. Family members were required to spend at least an hour a day in some effort that benefited mankind.

Henry Luce met Briton Hadden at the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut, and an immediate and intense bond developed between the young men. Hadden edited the school newspaper, the
Hotchkiss Record
, while Luce published the
Hotchkiss Literary Monthly
, contributing essays and poetry. At Yale University, their friendship strengthened, with Hadden as chairman of the
Yale News
and Luce its managing editor. They jointly interrupted their college careers in 1918 to enlist in the Student Army Training Corps, and it was then that they conceived the idea of founding a national news weekly.

The magazine the two men eventually produced in 1923 was considerably different from the
Time
of today.

They had drawn up a prospectus for a publication that featured condensed rewrites of information that appeared in daily newspapers—mainly the
New York Times
. The prospectus read: “TIME collects all available information on all subjects of importance. The essence of all this information is reduced to approximately 100 short articles, none of which are over 400 words. No article will be written to prove any special case.” For capital, the two twenty-four-year-old men had turned to the wealthy families of their Yale friends. The mother of one classmate wrote out a check for twenty thousand dollars, though uncertain the venture would succeed; before her death, the investment had appreciated to more than a million dollars.

From a foot-high stack of newspapers, the two men and their small staff produced the first issue of
Time
, which appeared in March 1923. Its thirty-two pages contained more than two hundred concise rehashed “items,” as Hadden dubbed the separate pieces, ranging in length from a mere three lines to one hundred lines. The cover portrait was a simple charcoal sketch of a recently retired congressman, Joseph Gurney Cannon. That first issue, it was written, met with “a burst of total apathy on the part of the U.S. press and public.” And when Hadden and Luce asked a prominent figure for advice on their first issue, he answered, “Let the first be the last.”

Undaunted, the two young editors revamped their magazine and its cover, introducing around the cover portrait a red margin which would become a
Time
trademark. But most important, they hired a staff to perform its own original reporting and writing. And the magazine acquired a reputation for its own variously acerbic, supercilious, and humorous writing style.
Time
’s writers coined words, committed puns, inverted syntax, and interjected tropes, epithets, and esoteric terms into nearly every paragraph.

These eccentricities came to be called the
“Time
style.” Many of the magazine’s phrases entered the American vernacular: “Tycoon,” a phonetic spelling of the Japanese
taikun
, meaning “mighty lord,” used only infrequently
in English, gained immense popularity. To a lesser degree, the magazine familiarized Americans with “pundit,” from the Hindu
pandit
, meaning “learned one,” and “kudos” (from the Greek
kydos
, meaning “glory”), employed by
Time
editors mainly to refer to honorary degrees. Forgotten
Time
neologisms include tobacconalia, improperganda, and radiorating.

The magazine that had been the dream of two college boys become a national, then an international, phenomenon.

When Hadden died in 1929 of a streptococcus infection—a week before the sixth anniversary of
Time
’s founding and not long after his thirty-first birthday—he left stock worth over a million dollars. In a boxed announcement on the first page of the next issue, a brokenhearted Henry Luce wrote of his college friend in the succinct, convoluted prose that had become the magazine’s hallmark: “Creation of his genius and heir to his qualities,
Time
attempts neither biography nor eulogy of Briton Hadden.”

The organization founded by Henry Luce would go on to fill home magazine racks with a selection of periodicals that made publishing history.

Fortune
appeared in February 1930. The small business section of
Time
could not accommodate the wealth of material its staff produced weekly, and in 1928, Henry Luce suggested that the company launch a periodical of restricted circulation to use
Time’s
business pages’ surplus.

Christened
Fortune
by Luce, the new magazine was a success from the start. As it grew in size, readership, and scope, its founder prided himself on the periodical’s record for accuracy amidst the torrent of facts and figures it regularly published. The magazine’s editors were so confident of that accuracy that in May 1937 they offered readers five dollars for every factual error they could find in
Fortune’s
pages. Not many readers nibbled at the five-dollar bait. But when the amount was doubled, nearly a thousand letters poured in. The editors conceded to two “major” errors, twenty-three “minor” ones, and forty discrepancies they labeled “small points.” They paid out four thousand dollars, then withdrew the offer because of the time involved in reading, checking, and answering readers’ allegations.

Following
Time
(1923),
Fortune
(1930), and
Life
(1936), the Luce publishing empire again made magazine history in 1954, with
Sports Illustrated
, and in 1973, with
People
. These two periodicals transformed the hackneyed journalism of the traditional sports and fan magazines into a new level of quality and popularity. In sifting through a magazine rack today, it is hard not to come upon a publication that owes its existence to the company started by two college classmates and lifelong friends, Briton Hadden and Henry Luce.

Newsweek
: 1933, New York

The Depression year of 1933 was a bleak period for starting a news weekly, especially since
Time
seemed to have captured that particular audience. Nonetheless,
Newsweek
was launched that year, in which one American
worker in four was unemployed, when businesses were failing at the rate of 230 a day, and when newspapers were called “Hoover blankets” and were valued as much for their warmth as for their information.

Newsweek
was founded by a disgruntled
Time
staffer. Thomas Martyn, an Englishman, had been hired by Hadden and Luce as
Time
’s first foreign news editor, under the mistaken notion that he was an experienced writer on world affairs. After gaining his first professional writing experience at
Time
, Martyn moved on to the
New York Times
, then he quit the newspaper to draw up a prospectus for his own news weekly.

Thomas Martyn gave both personal and professional reasons for starting his own periodical: He wished to “run Henry Luce out of business,” but he also firmly believed he could produce a better magazine. As he once wrote: “I think there’s room for another news magazine that isn’t quite as acid, that does a more thorough job of reporting, that can dig out the facts behind the news and give the news more meaning.”