When editors were gods

He started a famous magazine in his dorm room

Today is the birthday of Paul Williams, founder of Crawdaddy magazine, born in Boston on May 19, 1948. Williams started the pioneering rock magazine at age 17 in his dorm room at Swarthmore. According to his wife's Beloved Stranger blog, Williams is currently in a nursing home with early-onset dementia as the result of an accident.   

L. Frank Baum, magazine editor and creator of Oz

Today is the birthday of L. Frank Baum, author of the Oz books, born May 15, 1856 in upstate New York. Before finding his calling as a novelist, Baum edited several magazines—one for stamp collectors, one on poultry, and one for store window dressers called "The Show Window."

 

The woman and magazine behind Mother's Day

Today (the second Sunday in May) is, of course, Mother's Day. The holiday, which got its start in the early 20th century, was created largely by Anna Jarvis with the help of the National Magazine. As Jarvis advised in the National, "Live the day as your mother would have you live it."

A well-known health editor ends it all, 1911

One hundred and one years ago today (May 11, 1911), Dr. W.R.C. Latson, editor of Health Culture magazine, apparently shot himself in the head at his office on Riverside Drive in Manhattan. He left behind a note saying, "I have done my best—death."

Two editors who died on the Lusitania

Though the Titanic has been getting far more attention lately because of its recent centennial, today marks the anniversary of another major 20th century sea disaster, the sinking of the British passenger liner R.M.S. Lusitania off the southern coast of Ireland on May 7, 1915 by a German torpedo. Some 1,195 passengers and crew (published accounts differ on the exact number) died in the sinking. Among them were two well-known editors of the day, Elbert Hubbard, editor of The Philistine, and Herbert S. Stone, editor of The House Beautiful. Coincidentally, Hubbard seems to have been fascinated by the sinking of the Titanic, three years earlier, and wrote a number of pieces, like this one, about it. 

When a Hearst editor went on trial for promoting vice

On this day (May 5) in 1916, Sewell Haggard, editor of Hearst's Magazine, along with the publication's business and advertising managers, stood trial in a New York court for material in his then-current issue. The charges, brought against the magazine by John S. Sumner, head of the New York Society for the Prevention of Vice, involved a photograph of a statue, parts of a story, and a drawing in a cigarette ad. 

The judge dismissed the case a week later. Sumner, an energetic and publicity-savvy bluenose of his era, later turned his attention to James Joyce, Mae West, and many others whose work he judged a threat to the nation's morals.

 

Twenty-three years at the helm of a one-man magazine

It was on this day (May 3) in 1853 that Edgar Watson Howe, novelist, humorist, newspaperman, and the editor as well as lone writer of E. W. Howe's Monthly, was born in Treaty, Indiana. Known as the "Sage of Potato Hill," Howe founded his monthly ("Devoted to Indignation and Information") after retiring for the newspaper business and continued it for the next 23 years. Howe was famed in his day for pithy, often cynical observations, such as "No man would listen to you talk if he didn't know it was his turn next" and "No man's credit is as good as his money."

 

A crusading editor turned diplomat

It was on this day (April 29) in 1937 that Norman Hapgood, the crusading editor of Collier's magazine and Harper's Weekly, and briefly U.S. envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to Denmark, died following an operation. He was 69.

 

When Life magazine went on trial for obscenity

On this day (April 26) in 1938, Roy E. Larsen, publisher of Life magazine, was acquitted in a Bronx, New York, court on the charge of selling obscene and indecent literature and photographs. The case involved a Life article on the birth of a baby.

When anti-Nazi magazine editor was beaten in Brooklyn

On this day (April 23) in 1938, newspapers reported that 31-year-old Charles Weiss, editor of anti-Nazi magazine Uncle Sam, published in Brooklyn, N.Y., had been attacked by four apparent Nazis the previous Friday evening. The attackers had allegedly beaten and stripped the editor and painted black swastikas on his body after he refused to kiss a Nazi flag.

 

The Senate hearings that gave a boost to Mad

On this day (April 21) in 1954, a U.S. Senate subcommittee held a hearing to examine whether violent comic books were responsible for juvenile crime. Publisher William M. Gaines defended a cover drawing on one of his comics, depicting a man with an ax holding a woman's severed head. Asked whether he considered the cover to be in good taste, Gaines testified that he did, adding that showing the woman's neck dripping blood would have been in bad taste. Gaines next found himself defending a drawing of a man choking a woman to death with a crowbar. That fall, Gaines gave up on horror titles and began to focus on a little humor comic called Mad that his company had launched two years earlier. Mad was transformed into a slick magazine in the summer of 1955, in part to put it out of reach of the repressive Comics Code that the industry had adopted after the Senate hearings.

Esquire's Harold Hayes, birthday boy and New Journalism pioneer

Today is the birthday of Harold T.P. Hayes, future editor of Esquire magazine and patron of what was known at the time as The New Journalism, born in Elkin, North Carolina, on April 18, 1926. Hayes died in 1989.

Tomorrow, Hayes on the role of the magazine editor.