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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October 17, 1969: The beginning of the end.

If you’re new here, I wrote a much better end-of-the-year blog post two years ago. Consider checking it out while you’re here.

I’ll be striking the tent here on Hope Street in about four months, and it felt appropriate to devote the last end-of-year post here to a calendar entry with a palpable if mysterious feeling of mourning.

(This particular entry also marked its 45-year anniversary a couple of months ago, which is as good a reason as any other to write about it now.)

October 17, 1969. The Mets have been champions of the baseball world for about 24 hours.

Not too many of my grandfather’s calendar entries got a funereal black outline.

The entry of November 22, 1963, for instance, got only a partial outline. And that one appears to have been drawn more to compartmentalize the calendar day than to express mourning.

I assume that the outline drawn around Friday, October 17, 1969, was put there as a comment on the events of the day, and not merely as decoration. (It appears to have started out blue and been overdrawn with black.)

Something noteworthy clearly took place that day, since my grandparents phoned both of their children. In those days, you didn’t make long-distance calls just for the sheer hell of it, or at least my family didn’t.

The family tree doesn’t show any deaths that day, or surrounding days, in the immediate family.

And, while I didn’t take pictures of the surrounding calendar, I don’t remember any funerals being mentioned. (I probably would have taken pictures of follow-up events, had any been listed.)

So what the hell happened?

My dad doesn’t know, and he doesn’t specifically remember the phone conversation of October 17, 1969. But he has an interesting theory:

My grandpa worked his last day at Time-Life in Stamford in early January 1970. My dad theorizes that my grandpa was given notice on October 17, 1969, that his job would be eliminated in a few months. (In those days, companies would have been decent enough to keep their people employed through the December holidays.)

My grandpa’s draftsman job at Time-Life was not his first job. Nor would it be his last: He briefly hooked on with a firm in Norwalk for roughly the course of the 1970 baseball season, working his last day on Sept. 16.

But he held the Time-Life gig for 23 years — during which his kids grew up and he moved comfortably into the middle class and middle age. That was the job that defined him, and by which he defined himself; and I’m sure he would gladly have held it until he was 65, if circumstances had run that way.

That job was also the family’s sole means of support during those important and eventful years, unless you count the money my great-grandma made teaching piano lessons. (Maybe she got Social Security as well, I don’t know. But if she did, it didn’t pay too many of the bills.)

It is kind of touching, and not at all unbelievable, to think that my grandpa would have mourned the pending loss of his job. For the self-esteem, for the money, for the sense of purpose.

It might be a little far-fetched to imagine someone as undemonstrative and phlegmatic as he was making a public show of the bad news. But I’m sure he felt that way about it.

And that feeling might have resonated strongly enough to find physical form in a ragged black outline on his calendar.

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August 21, 1972: Sex on the coffee table.

With unrepentant and oddly zombie-ish expressions, the two young lovers (or the two young actors hired to portray lovers) sit on the coffee table at 1107 Hope Street, as uncomfortably as if they were there in person.

They are here — like others in their space, before and after them — to tell the straitlaced elders of the Blumenau family about a problem they didn’t know they were supposed to be concerned about.

From the other side of the generation gap they stare, their blank faces promising little in the way of explanation or enlightenment.

But they must have something to tell the world:

They’re on the cover of Time.

August 21, 1972. The young man, in particular, looks like Scorpio Murtlock.

On some levels, there is nothing about the August 21, 1972, cover of Time to set it apart from hundreds of other red-bordered covers from the same time period. I’m shamelessly using it because it’s attention-getting.

(Which, I imagine, is the reason Time created it in the first place.)

But on other levels, it makes a fine launching pad for a consideration of my grandfather’s relationship to mass media in general, and America’s largest news magazine in particular.

I’ve mentioned a few times that my grandpa worked as a draftsman at Time-Life in Stamford for many years.

He didn’t have any connection with the editorial side of the business; it wasn’t his job to rush off to Haiphong or Paris or Milwaukee on Henry Luce’s behalf to take the world’s ever-changing pulse.

Still, he was a faithful reader of the magazine. In fact, he held a lifetime subscription, courtesy of his longtime connection to the company.

(Time-Life arbitrarily canceled his “lifetime” subscription in the final year or two of his life, which was a rich source of black humor for a couple of weeks there.)

His grandson, in contrast, does not read the slimmed-down, dumbed-up mag that passes for Time these days.

For one thing, I have a very limited tolerance for Joel Stein. For another, I’ve discovered The Economist, which seems considerably more informative, comprehensive and adult than today’s Time.

And for a third, big trend stories — like “Sex & The Teenager” — tend to draw out my BS antennae. I rarely get very far into one before I start mentally punching jagged holes in the research, supporting evidence and conclusions.

It makes me wonder what attitude my grandpa took when he sat down to read stories like that in his latest copy of Time.

I think my grandpa trusted authority more than I do, and if an institution like Time magazine told him something, his default setting was to believe it — especially if he had no firsthand evidence to the contrary.

(There were no teenagers, sexy or otherwise, at 1107 Hope Street in the summer of 1972.)

But, he was not a stupid or credulous person. He had the analytical mind of an engineer, a tinkerer and a shade-tree mechanic, and I have to imagine he turned it to things beyond the merely mechanical.

When he sat down to stories like “Sex & The Teenager,” I wonder if he asked himself some of the base-level questions every consumer of mass media should ask themselves:

Who is telling me this?

Why are they telling me this?

What is their interest in telling me this?

How much of their evidence is one-off anecdotal, as compared to systematic study?

Do they answer opposing arguments with substance, or do they shrug them off?

Are they trying to influence me about the story’s importance through play and space? Is this subject truly as important — to me, and to society — as the story’s prominence would indicate?

And so on.

(Unfortunately, past cover stories from Time are only available to subscribers, so I can’t apply these questions to my own critical read of “Sex & The Teenager.” It might have been a decent story, for all I know … though I doubt it, kinda.)

The proper approach to mass media was just another of a million topics I never really covered with my grandfather.

So I can’t muster an honest guess on how he responded to lusty teenagers, or campaign finance, or the rise of skiing, or the troubled state of the Jesuits, or the bucolic joys of Minnesota, or any one of thousands of stories his favorite news magazine fed him over the years.

Perhaps he swallowed them all whole and unquestioned.

But I’m sure he read them with a decent degree of attention and concentration, anyway, which is a necessary prerequisite for critical thinking.

So I’ll leave him sitting in a comfortable chair in the front room … with the sound of traffic on Hope Street buzzing everpresent through the open window on a humid late-summer evening … furrowing his brow a little bit as he gets the word about Sex & The Teenager.

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