When editors were gods

On this day...

...in 1996, Frances Lear, founder of Lear's, a pioneering magazine for older women, died in New York City. Lear spent a reported $25 million of her $100-plus million divorce settlement from TV producer Norman Lear to launch her magazine, which started up in 1988 and survived for six years. Lear was supposedly the model for the title character in her husband's 1970s sitcom Maude. Her autobiography is "The Second Seduction" (Knopf, 1992).

Also dead on this day, in 1961: George H. Waltz, Jr., a former editor of Popular Science. He was 55.

On this day...

... in 1948, according to contemporary newspaper accounts, Fortune magazine predicted that Thomas E. Dewey would beat Harry Truman in the November presidential election. The magazine said its latest survey showed Dewey ahead by the "almost unbeatable margin of 44 percent to 31 percent." Truman, of course, went on to defeat Dewey, taking nearly 50 percent of the vote to Dewey's 45 percent. The incident recalled a similar boo-boo that befell the Literary Digest in 1936.

On this day...

... in 1964, Sam J. Boal, an editor of the Diners' Club Magazine, as well as a widely published freelancer, foreign correspondent, and Hemingway associate, died in a fire in his Manhattan apartment, apparently the result of smoking in bed. Boal was 51. 

On this day...

... in 1910, Otto Fuerbringer, who would edit Time magazine for most of the 1960s, was born in St. Louis. He died last year at age 97.

On this day...

...in 1995, the debut issue of George magazine, with John F. Kennedy, Jr., as editor and George Washington as namesake, went on sale. Explaining the magazine's mission in his inaugural editor's note, Kennedy said, "We believe that if we can make politics accessible by covering it in an entertaining and compelling way, popular interest and involvement in the process will follow." George survived Kennedy's death in a 1999 plane crash but published its farewell issue in 2001.

On this day...

... in 1941, Gertrude Battles Lane, editor for 30 years of the Woman's Home Companion magazine and one of the highest-paid women in the U.S. in her day, died at home in New York City. The chairman of her magazine's parent company once gave Lane what he apparently intended as the ultimate compliment, calling her "the best man in the business."

Quote

"Not only has the day gone by when editors sat in easy chairs and majestically sifted wheat from chaff in the piles of stuff sent prayerfully to them, but gone, too, is the day when an editor could sit in his office and plan a good magazine out of his inner consciousness." — Clara E. Laughlin, a successful author and magazine writer of her day, 1904.

On this day...

... in 1941, Lee Foster Hartman, editor of Harper's magazine at the time, dropped dead at his New York City apartment, while playing cards. Bernard De Voto, who wrote for Hartman, reminisced in the magazine's December 1941 issue that, "He required your best; no one ever had his permission to relax into carelessness or to write trivialities. I have known him to send a knotty job back time after time until it was right, not almost right but altogether so." At his death, Hartman was 61.

On this day...

... in 1974, Jessica Daves, editor of Vogue from 1952 to 1963, died at home in New York City. By all accounts, including a particularly snotty quote from "a friend" in her New York Times obit, Daves didn't look the part of a Vogue editor. "Everything about her was unappealing," Grace Mirabella, a later Vogue editor, recalled in her memoir, "In and Out of Vogue." However, Mirabella noted, Daves was "an excellent text editor and had a wide grip of culture, and she worked hard to make Vogue more serious, to prove that a woman's world wasn't just made up of 'frills and clothes,' as she put it." At her death, Daves was 76.  

What might have been

Other names considered for The New Yorker:

Manhattan

New York Life

New York Weekly

Our Town

Truth

... according to "Ross, The New Yorker and Me," a 1968 memoir by Ross's ex-wife Jane Grant, also an important figure in the early days of the magazine.

Quote

"The man who turns the pages of his magazine in slippered ease seldom realizes the labor involved in its preparation." — John Adams Thayer in "Astir: A Publisher's Life-Story" (1910). H. L. Mencken, who worked for Thayer at The Smart Set magazine, recalled him as "something of a nuisance."

On this day...

... in 1942, Conde Nast died at home on Park Avenue, following a heart attack. He was 68.