1964: In every dream home a heartache.

This past week marked the 62nd anniversary of the first issue of Sports Illustrated — the magazine that became must-read fare for American sports fans, despite being ridiculed by Time Inc. highbrows who called it names like Jockstrap and Sweat Socks.

My grandfather the Time Inc. employee, perhaps attuned to the great possibilities ahead, saved not only that first issue from August 1954 …

Wes Westrum of the Giants, catching, was the Giants’ manager at the time of SI’s 20th anniversary in August 1974. Eddie Mathews of the Braves, at bat, managed the Braves in 1972-74 but didn’t quite make it to the anniversary: He was fired in late July.

… but also the first of several pre-production mockups, or “dummies,” from the previous December.

Not a swimsuit in sight.

The SI saga is interesting enough … but really, an enterprise as entrenched and successful as SI doesn’t need me to tell its story.

Instead, we’ll look at a note from my grandfather’s personal journal, which documents a different, less successful Henry Luce magazine venture … one that my grandpa never bothered saving souvenir copies of.

This journal entry was clearly revisited and revised several times; I’m assigning it a date of 1964, for reasons that will become apparent.

I’d heard of Time Inc.’s Big Four publications – Time, Life, Fortune and SI — three of which continue to publish today.

I wasn’t familiar with Architectural Forum, but its name made it easy enough to imagine — a specialized trade journal. (The New York Times’ obit of Luce said he bought Architectural Forum in 1932 because he was interested in the field.)

But what was House & Home? Was it a lifestyle and decorating magazine, of the sort that are a dime a dozen on today’s magazine racks? Did Henry Luce pioneer a publication America wasn’t ready for, but has since come to crave?

The answer turned out to be … no.

Various sources, including the obit linked above, indicate that House & Home was spun out of Architectural Forum in 1952. The new title was aimed at the building trade, not at home decorators. It targeted the booming residential construction market, while the older title continued to focus on commercial construction.

Time announced the new magazine’s arrival in January 1952 with a characteristically backwards-written blurb: “To more than 100,000 subscribers this week went a brand-new magazine : HOUSE & HOME, ‘for those who plan, build, buy, sell or finance new houses.’ “

And 10 years later, a full-page ad in Luce’s Life magazine touted House & Home as “the management magazine of America’s biggest industry,” full of house plans, construction products and methods, financing information, and other dope that would help professionals “design, build, finance, supply and sell houses that won’t be obsolescent before the first owner moves in.”

(The cover of one issue, from April 1955, can be seen here.)

It actually sounds like an old issue of House & Home might be an interesting read, the way insider snapshots from the past sometimes are.

And, given all the houses that got built in America during those years, one would think such a magazine would thrive.

But it didn’t. Or, at least, it didn’t do well enough to be worth keeping around in the Time empire.

According to Luce’s obit, House & Home was sold to McGraw-Hill in 1964, the same year Architectural Forum was folded.

(The two decisions were apparently made separately — see how my grandpa reduced the number of Time titles from six, to five, to four.)

The name House & Home is still being used today, but the focus on the building trade was abandoned somewhere along the line. The current publication is very much in the mass-market home design tips-and-tricks bag, with a sideline in celebrity headlines like “Can You Believe A Jonas Brother Built This Jersey Home?”

Given the power of Henry Luce’s publishing empire back in the ’50s and ’60s, I wonder if Time Inc. could have created or defined the kind of home magazine America eats up today.

I’m sure ladies’ magazines over the decades have offered plenty of decorating tips, and Time would not have been the first publisher to enter the genre.

Still, since Luce and Co. dominated the newsmagazine and sports magazine fields, one imagines they could have owned home design and lifestyle as well, with a little bit of vision. All those new suburban homes could have been ripe targets for a well-pitched publication.

On the other hand, given the internal resistance to Sports Illustrated, imagining Time Inc. entering the home-design field might be farcical.

A company that scoffed at the idea of a magazine with Y.A. Tittle on the cover would probably have laughed itself hoarse at a cover piece on “Redecorating Your Farmhouse Colonial.”

So, who knows. Opportunities that seem evident in the rearview mirror are not always evident at the time.

Just ask the Time bigwigs who probably went to their graves thinking of Sports Illustrated as “Sweat Socks.”

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Time fades away.

No deep truths about my grandpa this week; just an errand that I think he would have enjoyed, even if it made him shake his head in disbelief.

Time Inc. will probably show up with some frequency in the remaining installments of Hope Street.

As mentioned last week, one of the new documents my folks unearthed is a journal in which my grandpa jotted down technical and scientific tidbits — mostly related to his job with Henry Luce’s magazine colossus.

This week we focus on a nugget that was almost certainly fed him by the company PR department. I do not think he figured it out himself — not because he wasn’t capable, but because he didn’t show his work, and he was a thorough sort.

America’s weekly photo magazine was either on its way up when my grandpa wrote this undated entry, or on its way down.

The former is more likely. If Wiki is to be believed, Life’s circulation at one point soared as high as 13.5 million copies per week, and it was still printing 8.5 million copies a week as late as 1971 — the year before the classic version of the magazine ended its print run.

Measuring this week’s print run of Life, of course, is no more possible than measuring this week’s Nielsen rating for The Ed Sullivan Show. After being rebooted as a monthly magazine and a newspaper insert, the once-omnipresent rectangular red nameplate is no more.

(The Life name might still be used for those cheesy commemorative/”collectible” issues you see at grocery checkout counters. I don’t look closely at those so I don’t know for sure.)

Anyway, I decided to adapt this note to the year 2015, using a surviving stallion from the Time Inc. stable, and solve the kind of riddle my grandpa would have enjoyed turning his pencil to:

If all the issues of this week’s printing of Time magazine were piled one on top of another, how high would the pile reach?

Various sources, including Wiki, put Time’s 2014 paid circulation at roughly 3.29 million. I’ll round that up to a nice neat 3.3 million to make the math easier. (Time is, Wiki says, the nation’s second-most widely circulated weekly magazine, trailing only People.)

I will also assume “paid circulation” is acceptably equal to one week’s print run. Scholars of the print biz — and I know there is at least one in the crowd — can correct me if that is wrong, and I’ll redo the math.

The difficult part of the equation is measuring the height of a typical issue of Time: Like a $2 chicken dinner, it doesn’t stack up like it used to. My father suggested a micrometer might be needed to do the trick.

He stopped subscribing a few years ago. But in the name of science, he brought a ruler to his local library on my behalf and — while using his quiet voice, I’m sure — measured the height of the July 27 issue:

One-sixteenth of an inch.

So, then. 3.3 million copies multiplied by .0625 (that’s one-sixteenth) would make a stack 206,250 inches tall.

Divide that by 63,360 (the number of inches in a mile), and we find that one week’s stack of Times would measure slightly less than 3.26 miles high.

Not quite so impressive, is it? Hell, I can jog three-and-a-quarter miles. (Maybe not straight up.)

If you want to compare today’s Time with yesterday’s Life, that 22-mile stack of Lifes equaled 1,393,920 inches. If 7 million stacked issues of Life stretched 1,393,920 inches tall, then each issue stood roughly two-tenths of an inch high, back in the day.

(If your gut response to all this is to point out that an actual stack of millions of magazines would be shorter, because the weight and compression exerted on the issues would lead to measurable reduction in many of their heights, I will mail you a quarter, along with directions to the sense-of-humor shop.)

Unlike the Life days — when that 22-mile stack represented the magazine’s entire reach — today’s Time has an online presence as well. I’m sure there are well-paid industry consultants who can magic up a “formula” for how improbably high my Time-stack would be if I took online readers into account.

No matter. My grandpa would not be impressed by the state of today’s publishing industry. A stack three-and-a-quarter miles high might not even have impressed him enough to jot down in his notebook.

That’s life.

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