Monday October 11, 2004 Of Another Time, Of Another Place

Monday October 11, 2004 Of Another Time, Of Another Place

Over the years I’ve known my friend “M” in an number of capacities: first as a copy editor at the magazine where we both worked, then as a writer earning his living explaining the work of his patrons to the outside world, and more recently as an copy editor working on a magazine that I edited for a time. “M” is now a freelance writer working out of Brooklyn, New York. I’m on the opposite coast. We meet once or twice a year when I make it back to New York for a conference or he makes his annual sojourn west to meet with his major client.
“M” more than I was part of a rich publishing tradition that still remains in the legitimate media based in Manhattan: Time Warner and their collection of current affairs magazines, the major newspapers of most any major metropolitan area. We both worked at McGraw Hill when the publishing company had publications serving the high-tech world. The magazine was called Electronics and it was founded in April 1930. O.H. Caldwell was the publications first editor. His first editorial began as follows:
“For this vital pulsing electronic art a clearinghouse is needed—an engineering journal that will gather together these widespread activities; chronicle scientific and industrial advances abroad and here, and provide practical usable information which can be put to work. Such a journal must have scientific vision to look above and beyond the present; it must be courageous and devoted in its stand for progress and for expanding applications,,,”
The publication survived until the late 1980s when McGraw-Hill sold the property to the Dutch Publishing Giant. The Dutch, actually their American surrogate, took the venerable magazine and destroyed its last bit of life. Once the deed had been done the Dutch sold the magazine as well as another publishing company they had acquired a few years earlier to a Cleveland, Ohio-based, rust belt publishing company, where it died in the mid-1990s. Unhappily I was the editor who wrote the last editorial for the magazine, which by that time was a mere shadow of its former self.
“M” served on the copy desk at the magazine under Ms. “M” a Brit who had a very clear view of how the English language should be written and it was her style that made the magazine at its peak immensely readable. However, it was the ruthlessness of the copy desk on the editors in the field that made each piece submitted to the magazine something worth reading. I joined the magazine after both M’s had left but the copy desk still worked in the same deliberate fashion. The editor of the magazine back then was B who bore an uncanny resemblance to William Randolph Hearst.
L, the magazine’s publisher who I had worked for at another magazine, had recruited me. L liked me because I knew how to schmooze as well as bring in a story. The copy desk was then ruled and I use that term deliberately by “B”. When I would submit a story B would read it over once and hit me with a barrage of questions and in the process pointing out inconsistencies in logic, bad use of language, missing information, and I would spend almost as much time fixing these problems as writing the original piece. After I had completed all this work and had begun another assignment, I would get another call from B and the process with the first piece would begin again, not as extensive as the first time but equally tedious and I would get a sting of B’s tongue as he pointed my failings in the use of the language.
After the first devastating experience of having every word I had entered into my computer called into question, I became more disciplined and deliberate about what I wrote. Over time the session grew less lengthy as I would have anticipated much of what B was going to ask, but he got immense pleasure from finding something I had overlooked, nevertheless. It was the best time of my life because it was a place where people were really intense about getting the story right and making it readable. Nothing we every produced was ever good enough but the constant struggle to make it perfect always ensured the final product was better than anything anyone else was putting out.
I recount this story because after putting Electronics out of its misery I was hired by a start-up publication in Silicon Valley. I hired my friend M to move out from Boston—where he was living at the time, to Mountain View, where the magazine was based. My idea was to bring that same publishing ethic to this new publication. I also wanted to try to recapture that wonderful time again, but as the old saying goes, ‘you can’t go home again’ and it’s true. Mountain View was not Manhattan. Our younger staff found M’s style overbearing so the result was a far cry from what I had in mind.
I’m reminded of a poem I use to read to my daughters called “Each and All” by Ralph Waldo Emerson. The poet describes coming upon delicate shells at the river’s edge, and bringing them home only to find that “…the poor, unsightly, noisome things had left their beauty on the shore with the sun and the sand the wild uproar…”
Nevertheless, we had a good five-year run and at the end of the millennium the publishing company was sold to a long time rival of the old Electronics for a goodly sum—the VCs got their money out of the venture with a return equivalent to rolling over CDs for the ten year period they invested in the property. The staff was assimilated into the acquiring company with many of the finance and support functions being let go. M and I got new jobs in something called custom publishing. I left after a year but M stayed on moving back to an office the publishing company had in Manhattan. He was let go about a year ago and resumed his freelance writing work.
The reality is that those noble words that began Electronics in the early decades of the 20th Century belong to another era, as does the magazine.