I Miss Magazines

The assignment in Evelyn Sloan’s ninth grade English class at Pleasant Valley Junior High was to find a magazine in the library, adopt it as our very own, read and understand it, then stand up and unpack it in front of the whole class. It was first-come, first-served and by the time I got around to it, all the good ones were taken, and I was left to select from a collection of magazines I’d never heard of.

I chose Harper’s Bazaar, for the sole reason that Ali MacGraw’s chocolate browns made direct eye contact with me from the cover. If love meant never having to say you were sorry, at age 14, I was a goner.

At 14, I was also clueless. I had no idea an entire industry was built around fashion and style, communicated to those who cared about such things through publications like Harper’s Bazaar. All I knew was that Ali MacGraw was drilling a hole in my junior high soul, screaming, pleading even, from the library magazine rack, “Hey kid, pick me!”   

I stumbled through my verbal magazine report, oblivious.

“Uh... looks like there’s some ads in here for hair spray.” 

Hard copy magazines used to be a thing, and I miss them. They were a huge part of what led me down a career path that included journalism, politics and advocacy.

In the fall of 1968, I devoured my father’s weekly U.S. News & World Report. It was there I learned that Richard Nixon saw George Wallace as a bigger threat to his White House bid than Hubert Humphrey, since the segregationist Wallace would carry the deep south states that otherwise would have gone to Nixon.

My first magazine subscription was Boys Life, an arm of what was then the Boy Scouts of America. My very own name and address, printed right there on a label in the corner of the magazine’s cover. Boys Life hit me over the head with trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.

Boys Life tried desperately to keep me on the straight and narrow, subtly communicating that only danger and ruin would follow any latent adoration aimed Ali MacGraw’s way.  

I would regularly polish off Sports Illustrated and Sport and came to appreciate that journalism applied to my favorite players and teams made me a better sports fan. And by better I mean more informed.

But nothing topped The Sporting News, a weekly tab on newsprint that published the box score from every single big league game the week before. It was here that Vida Blue’s blazing fastball was converted to statistics. Numbers that told the story and stay with me today.

As I grew into young adulthood, the old man’s U.S. News & World Report gave way to Lance Morrow in Time and George Will in Newsweek. All these years later, I still try to emulate them here.

In the late 20^th century, seemingly on the very cusp of the digital avalanche, I subscribed to a pair of slicks which sought to do for their niches what Harper’s Bazaar did for fashion. JFK Jr’s George treated politics as part and parcel of pop culture and lifestyle. Brill’s Content was a media watchdog publication, whose last issue rolled off the presses in October 2001, a full generation before the word “content” became a catchall for all of today’s public-facing down-dumbing digital data.

Way back in 1970, two years before Ali MacGraw’s intense gaze, Joni Mitchell sang the truth. You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.

I wonder if Evelyn Sloan is still with us. I wonder if she’ll give me a do-over.

Mike Matson’s column appears every other weekend in The Mercury, and he hosts ‘Within Reason,’ weekdays at 9 a.m. on NewsRadio KMAN. Follow his writings at mikematson.com