Blog: Penn State Homecoming—a view from the old age home; plus my stories about working at Scanlan’s Monthly the first national magazine to publish Hunter Thompson with whom I did meet.

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It is 10:45 PM on Beaver Avenue, just off Allen, and the nightly noise on this Penn State’s Homecoming   Weekend is milder than I expected. There are, of course, the heavy traffic, the bar across the street, and every now and then….

It is 3:15 in the morning and I have come again focused on you—not focused on any realms but yours. The noise outside my window is disturbing. I heard a woman scream at the top of her voice and loud obscene noises without much interruption.

By way of amusement during this vigil until quiet prevails at 4 or 5 in the morning, I have been reading Scanlan’s Monthly, a publication for which I worked shortly after I graduated from Columbia College. I was hired as a research director of Scanlan’s at the downstairs bar at Sardi’s.

I needed a job. I had been unable to find a publisher. My agent Marie Rodell, who was Rachel Carson’s agent and helped Bey Friedan in the writing of the Feminine Mystique, liked my novel and tried very hard to sell it. The clearest conclusion: I need a job.

So, I went to my news rack and bought a copy of Scanlan’s Monthly. The January issue startled as it showed a large copy of the check the publication had received. The check was for $675,000 made out to Scanlan’s. The two editors wrote: “We must be fiercely candid about who owns this new magazine.  Over 700 people in these Unites States bought stock in a public issue floated by our underwriter. Frankly, we don’t even know the names of our stockholders. Moreover, we don’t even care. Our deal with the underwriter was that the editors have absolute and dictatorial control of the magazine.”

Who wouldn’t want to work for these guys?  These guys were Sydney Zion, an attorney who worked for the New York Times and wrote about gangsters and bad guys. Courtesy of my employment I had the opportunity to spend more time than I cared to in the company of men who had just been released from prison for armed robbery and the like.

The other guy was Warren Hickle III, who was a very well-known magazine editor who could not be trusted with money. Obviously there will be more Warren details—Warren was a genius. He could convince Sidney to sign checks for one of his schemes. His most famous accomplishment was exposing Hunter Thomas, whose career he nursed along, to a national audience.

I remember going to the office early one afternoon, and there was an Englishman who I could quickly see is the finest graphic artist I ever experienced (and his caricatures are superb). Ralph Steadman was standing in the center of the office drawing on a large pad. He was drawing a racing horse with a penis so large that the penis dominated your field of vision.

Where was Hunter Thompson the writer sent to cover the Kentucky Derby? “Drunk somewhere,” Steadman said in a tone that indicated he did not want to talk about Hunter Thompson ever again. Steadman finished his drawings and got on the next plane to London.

Hunter Thompson showed up late one night at the office. Now, the office was on 44^th Street. There was a pornographic movie theater and at least 12 prostitutes on the same block as the office. One of the assistant editors happened to be working late. She knew that we were delaying printing the issue until Hunter Thompson wrote his article. Our whole world was waiting for him to write and he wanted to write. To help Hunter Thompson out, the editor unthinkingly handed Thompson the entire bottle of the office’s amphetamine. In the days of pre-Red Bull, it was commonplace for large legal and accounting forms to have a bottle of amphetamine handy just in case it was needed.

What the assistant editor had not foreseen was that Hunter Thompson swallowed the entire full bottle of amphetamine. She spent the rest of the night walking Hunter Thompson around the block until the drug wore off. Warren and Sidney put Thompson in the Royalton, across the street from the Algonquin. He was given a bathtub full of beer, forbidden to have any hard liquor and write.

By this time, I reported for work. I was assigned to go to the Royalton and take back to the office to send to the printer, one page at time, the article that, when published was entitled with the edited bylines: “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved written under duress by Hunter S. Thompson, Sketched with eyebrow pencil and lipstick by Ralph Steadman.”

The first paragraph of the first page I took out of Thompson’s hands and delivered to the office read, “I got off the plane around midnight and no one spoke as I crossed the dark runway to the terminal. The air was thick and hot, like wandering into a steam bath. Inside people hugged each other and shook hands….b ig grins and a whoop here and there: By God! You old Bastard! Glad to see you. Boy! Damn good…And I mean it.’”

Why am I writing about my recollection with Scanlan’s?

I would like talk to you about journalism. I grew up professionally during an unusual time in the’ 60s and 70’s when magazines were creating the news and features reported in the press. It was the age of Tom Wolfe, whose brilliant and eclectic non-fiction books and articles for Esquire, transformed how many non-fiction writers portray reality.  Armies of the Night received a Pulitzer for Norman Mailer’s chronicle of a march on the Pentagon (where organizers of the march said they plan to levitate the Pentagon off the ground using the energy of collected demonstrators). Mailer enters the book in the third person, referring continually to how Mailer reacted to the event.

The kind of reporting I am referring to is neglected in journalism schools. Journalism schools teach how to report in a disinterred fashion an article intended to be without bias.

 Straight news reporting serves a purpose.

Another kind of neglected journalism could also serve its purpose if….

Stay tuned for another sleepless night. It is 4:45 AM and most of the noise is gone. Time for sleep.

--Joel Solkoff