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From the Vault of Art Shay: My Guru

14.09.11

When I became a lowly Life reporter in 1947, I dizzily wandered the halls of the Time-Life Building above that Rockefeller Center skating rink, above that strenuous statue of the earth being held on Atlas's shoulders and Paul Manship's glitzy rendition of Prometheus giving man fire.

The statues weren't the sexiest objects sighted by a young reporter - there were the bouncy girls in their summer frocks, letting the glory of their newly burgeoning postwar sex hang out, smelling of Chanel No. 5 and its imitators, striding into their fifty buck a week lives like those Soviet statues of an earlier generation, without the baggage of earth motherhood and an 80-inch bust.

It was the best of times and the best of times. My job as a freshman was to guard the "news" desk editors from drop-in nuts and PR men hawking products, politicians, actresses, stunts, all designed to capture a free page in Life worth about $50,000 in the advertising market. Henrik Ten Eyck was sure he'd discovered the Iroquois Rosetta stone proving that Norsemen had mated with Indians in 1200 and given them words that were the same in Norse as they were in Iroquois. Words like "ohye" for eye. Waiting to see me was an agent with a big-boobed starlet in tow. She'd be starring in a TV series and was available for "editorial parties." There was a guy from Gristedes grocery chain promising to fry eggs on the sidewalk when it got up to 91 degrees. Paid by Perdue eggs. There was a citrus man leading a red-headed kid, age three, who ate lemons and eschewed ice cream cones. (That story got in!)

Source: Chicagoist