Word: thurber
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...From the beginning," says Thurber, "Ross cherished his dream of a Central Desk at which an infallible omniscience would sit, a dedicated genius, out of Technology by Mysticism, effortlessly controlling and coordinating editorial personnel, contributors, office boys, cranks and other visitors, manuscripts, proofs, cartoons, captions, covers, fiction, poetry and facts, and bringing forth each Thursday a magazine at once funny, journalistically sound, and flawless. He had persuaded himself that I might be just the wonder man he was looking...
...February 1927, Reporter James Thurber quit his $40-a-week job on the New York Evening Post to start work as a $100-a-week deskman on Harold Wallace Ross's The New Yorker. Thurber was then 32; The New Yorker had just turned two; and Editor Ross, at 34, was already the whip-wielding crank who was to inspire and bedevil staffers until his death in 1951. In the November Atlantic Humorist Thurber started a serialized memoir of Ross by recalling their early days together...
...were destined to fit together like 4th and July, but they got off to a strange start when Ross hired Thurber as his managing editor. ("In those days," explained Thurber last week, "you started at the top and worked your way down.") Ross affected to despise writers; Thurber wanted only to write. "He wanted, first of all, to know how old I was, and when I told him it set him off on a lecture. 'Men don't mature in this country, Thurber,' he said. 'They're children. I was editor of the Stars...
...first job, at 14, was that of a reporter for the Salt Lake City Tribune, and one of his early assignments was to interview the madam of a house of prostitution. "Always self-conscious and usually uncomfortable in the presence of all but his closest women friends," writes Thurber, "the young reporter began by saying to the bad woman (he divided the other sex into good and bad), 'How many fallen women do you have...
Ross distrusted most of those who wrote for The New Yorker, says Thurber. "He nursed an editorial phobia about what he called the functional: 'bathroom and bedroom stuff.' Years later he deleted from a Janet Planner 'London Letter' a forthright explanation of the nonliquid diet imposed upon the royal family and dignitaries during the coronation of George VI. 'So-and-so can't write a story without a man in it carrying a woman to bed,' he wailed. And again, 'I'll never print another [John] O'Hara story...