Edsel Read Free Page B

me.
    “What sort of photographer are you?”
    “I’m thinking of getting one of those Polaroids and save paying for developing when I take a picture of my thumb.”
    “That won’t do. Right now our photojournalists are using Speed-graphics but we’re switching to those Japanese jobs.”
    “What’s a photojournalist?”
    “The magazine business is different from most. While everyone else is specializing, we find it more feasible economically to double up. Nobody’s hiring photographers and writers any more. If you want to grow with Pix! , you’ll have to become equally proficient with a typewriter and a camera.”
    “In other words, two jobs, one salary.”
    “To be blunt.”
    “Thanks for lunch, Mr. Hall.” I stood.
    “You don’t want the job?”
    “I’m a good writer. That’s my talent. I’m a great reporter. That’s my skill. I’ll never be anything more than a mediocre photographer and I’m too old for that. Good luck finding your photojournalist. I never met a good button-pusher who could write a caption to save his life.”
    “Frankly I’m relieved. This is a job for a young man. You older types are too cynical.”
    “I hope I never get so old I wind up as cynical as you.”
    Seabrook Hall and I didn’t cross paths again, nor did I ever see another issue of Pix! A couple of years later, killing time in a Rexall downtown before another interview, I saw his name on the statement of ownership page of a comic book. The cover featured a gelatinous green mass with eyes and teeth devouring a half-naked woman who looked like Ava Gardner.

3
    O NE DAY IN 1953, GIVEN a choice of magazines in a dentist’s waiting room that included Jack ’n’ Jill , Popular Science , and a fourteen-month-old copy of Argosy , I picked up House Beautiful to look at the homes shaped like boxes of Fig Newtons with tricky siding in front and as dull as an Eisenhower speech in back, and stopped at a line in the editor’s column: “You will have a greater chance to be yourself than any people in the history of civilization.” That statement remained with me long after I had ceased thinking about two-toned refrigerators and the artist’s conception of a living room with space for the family car. Every now and then I hauled it out like the Riddle of the Sphinx or an elaborately tangled string of Christmas bulbs and tried to make sense of it. I still do, and have come to believe that once I have I will have succeeded in figuring out that whole era. Like the time itself, the line is as simple and diabolical as the mind of a child.
    Nothing about it, line or time, should have surprised me. In my youth, we had fought a war to put the world back the way it was before the war started, only to find that the fighting itself had changed it radically and forever. It began with men in paper collars waltzing with women in toe-length hems to “After the Ball” and ended with those same men tipping up hip flasks and watching women’s reflections on glossy tabletops as they wriggled to “The Black Bottom” in brief skirts and no underwear. Now we had gone to war again, first with cavalry, then with rockets. If nothing much changed between FDR’s snooty profile on a newsreel screen and Frankie Orr’s humble face on the box in the living room, from that point forward nothing stayed put. Clark Gable’s cocky grin dissolved into Marlon Brando’s Neanderthal pout. Buicks sprouted holes that had no function. Sing “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window” as loudly as she could, Patti Page couldn’t drown out a groin-beat with roots in Africa thumping up from the South, childish and primitive, that caused an age group we didn’t know existed, something called a Teen Ager, to tear apart the seats and rip the sconces off the walls of theaters where “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” pulsed beneath the credits of The Blackboard Jungle. The Russians, who claimed to have invented everything from air travel to the Flo-Thru tea bag, suddenly