Editor’s Note: For now over 75 years, The Baylor Line has been publishing vivid storytelling from across the Baylor Family. I don’t think our archives full of deep, inspirational features should live solely on shelves, so we are bringing them back to life in BL Classics. In this November 1980 Classic, Kathy Hampton reflects on her summer internship at People magazine in Manhattan.
When the subway car lurched to a stop at Rockefeller Center, I’d worm my way to an exit and join a cluster of business suits and attachés in boarding an escalator ever on its way to a great silver elevator bank. Stepping quickly from my disappearing stair step, I’d move toward the-next-car-up and flash my I.D. at a guard who would “good morning” me past as if he believed my face matched the mug shot I showed him.
Once the elevator doors slid shut, I’d sometimes check the card myself. I’d feel a delighted little knot of butterflies come to life as I recognized my own picture and read the words printed alongside it-TIME INCORPORATED. That plastic card remains proof of an incredible summer, of ten weeks I spent as an intern for People magazine in Manhattan.
My stint in the “Big Apple” began June 10 when I arrived in New York along with fifty-five other interns participating in a program sponsored by the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME). We had been chosen from colleges and universities throughout the nation and were assigned as interns to fifty different consumer and trade publications. Many of us had never been to New York — I hadn’t ventured much farther from my home in Fort Worth than a Baylor away-game in Lubbock and very few of us had lived or worked in Manhattan.
Consequently, the thin air of sophistication I tried to maintain when I arrived at New York’s La Guardia Airport blew out the window on the ride to the dorm where most of us lived. By evening when I called home to report a safe flight, my voice had developed a strange, new vibrato. New York was like a foreign country and I’d never felt quite so on my own.
But as I looked around I found I was alone only in my phone booth. Next to my booth was a string of about six other booths, each filled with another intern making a quasi-confident call home.
It wasn’t long before our common bewilderment made for many instant but binding friendships. Soon we were riding subways home from work to our New York University dorm in Greenwich Village, talking shop over dinner, and looking forward to marathon weekends of going, seeing, and doing. My roommate, Carol, interned with Newsweek.
Next door lived the people we came to know as Billboard and Travel & Leisure. Down the hall were Ladies’ Home Journal, American Baby, and Forbes. Scattered about the rest of the dorm were interns representing an assortment of magazines ranging from Penthouse to Progressive Grocer and schools from the Ivy League to the Bible Belt.
Certainly there was great variety within our group, but our differences melted when we left the front steps of our dorm. We lived in the heart of Greenwich Village, across the street from the great white arch that leads into Washington Square. Scuttling along, wrapping myself that first night in a shell of other interns, I was overwhelmed, frightened, and enchanted all at once. In the block-sized park I was surrounded by a kaleidoscope of people: people roller-skating, playing chess, singing, sleeping, playing Frisbee. Children ran through a fountain and young men offered us drugs: “Don’t be shy, get high,” they’d encourage, “hashish, cocaine, Mexican ladies . . . check it out; check it out; check it out.”
Nearby two young men walked hand-in-hand. A paraplegic zipped through the park on a skateboard, propelling himself with his hands. An old woman carrying a Lord and Taylor sack dug in a rusty trash barrel and then finished off a discarded cream soda. Old men spoke of politics and the horrors of abstract art. Black teenage boys carried prestige in huge portable stereos as they walked through the square in time with loud heavy music.
Ten of us ate dinner together that first night at a sidewalk cafe where we could continue watching the parade. We had a wonderful time; but of all the things I could have ordered, I chose a spinach omelette, an omelette I’ll never forget. It churned around all evening in an already excited stomach. My mind felt swollen with all I’d seen. I knew I’d never go to sleep. It took about five minutes.
The next few days we met as a group in ASME-sponsored orientation sessions. We listened to success stories told by editors and executives such as Ruth Whitney, editor-in-chief of Glamour, and Richard Stolley, managing editor of People. Former interns smugly described the jobs they held with major publications and explained just how they went about seeking employment. We filled notepads with facts and figures from the magazine worldly and received lists and booklets and maps bursting with places to go and see and eat. My mind was buzzing with words and figures and faces. The schedules we were given promised to keep up the pace all summer: sandwich and pickle luncheons with different speakers every Friday; a lunch at McGraw-Hill; and a wine and cheese party at “Top of the Week” in the Newsweek building. Before we left New York we would ask questions of editors from Time, Travel & Leisure, Good Housekeeping, The New Yorker, Reader’s Digest and many others.
After two full days of seminars I felt I’d been in New York weeks. We spent every spare minute walking up and down the streets we’d seen in movies and sung about in popular songs. Until a policeman suggested we move on, we munched hot pretzels and Italian Ices on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. We listened to a jazz band of middle-aged men who played requests from passersby and met an impish old man who insisted he was Buckwheat from the old T.V. series “Little Rascals.”
My stock of “New York Horror Stories” faded into a more rounded repertoire. Although I never learned to ignore the torn cotton shirts and loneliness of the old men in the parks or the filthy, hungry and drunk women who huddled on sidewalks beneath towers of plated glass and elegance, and while I was incensed by the greed and apathy of our society, I was infatuated by the rhythm and color that swirled around me.
After the orientation sessions ended we were to meet our editors at a luncheon at the Summit Hotel. I had no idea what to expect and felt a keen relapse of my first night queasiness, i.e. “Spinach Omelette Syndrome.” Back in February when I learned I had been chosen for the internship program I was given a list of magazines from which I was to choose three magazines I’d like to work for. Robert Kenyon, the director of the program, pointed out he couldn’t assure any of us we would be assigned our first choice publication, but that he would attempt to match our interests with the needs of the magazines. There were many publications I would have enjoyed, but since Hal Wingo, a 1957 Baylor graduate, is news editor of People, I put that magazine as my first choice. I was, I confess, a little leery. I braced myself for secretaries in sunglasses and John Travolta at the water fountain.
I was never disappointed. No, the secretaries didn’t wear Foster Grants and I never really drank after John, but the Time-Life Building had an electricity all its own. The periodical offspring of Time Inc. had been a part of my existence since kindergarten when I’d cut pictures of animals-whose-names- began-with-“E” out of Life. The corporate cafeteria fed the editors and writers and photographers behind the bylines of Sports Illustrated, Money, Fortune, People, Time and now, the new Time baby, Discover.
The words written in the offices I saw were read by millions of people each week in languages and countries all over the world. Time magazine, for instance, is printed in 325 different demographic and geographic editions. How many coffee tables and doctor’s offices that must mean. It left me breathless.
Much to my jubilation, People’s assistant news editor was on vacation much of the summer. And by the time she returned, it was time for Hal to take his leave. Their absence meant an empty office complete with view and wall-sized world map. I made my move with haste. My work at the magazine was varied and always interesting. My main duties were those of a researcher. I used the elaborate “Time Dot System” to check every word, fact, figure and quote. When I was ready to swear before an editor that a word was correct, I proudly placed a dot over it. This process wasn’t as easy as it may sound. Sometimes I spent entire days verifying short, seemingly simple stories. By the time I checked a story with the library, the lawyers, the correspondent, and the writer, the margins were covered with corrections. A mistake in the copy meant my time to shine — I’d get to replace a word or, I tremble at the thought, an entire sentence.
An example of the sort of problems that kept me occupied for hours was in a story about the new forty-first edition of Who’s Who. The lead of the story originally read: “It’s the most important arbiter of reputation this side of St. Peter’s ledger.” Now how, pray tell, does one prove St. Peter has a ledger? It’s popularly known he presides over a certain gate, but a ledger? We eventually changed the wording to “St. Peter’s gate.” Other checking jobs involved talking to press agents, authors, European correspondents, and often the subjects themselves. My working hours varied, but averaged from 10 a.m. to 1 a.m. Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday with often a half day of work on Wednesday. The nights I worked late, dinner was catered and People furnished a cab back to my dorm.
Besides researching, I was able to report a story for the “Lookout” section about a Broadway star. I also led a couple of sessions with the circulation department and did some interviewing for a “round-up” on food critics and how they did (or didn’t) deal with weight control. It was a tricky topic for interviews with butterballs such as New York Times food editor, Mimi Sheraton, and chef/author James Beard.
I can’t remember ever wasting a day or night off. I took trips to Maryland, Pennsylvania and New Jersey and tried to explore every borough of New York. One of the most memorable evenings was early in June when for a quarter I boarded the Staten Island Ferry with a group of other interns. We rode back and forth across the channel until nearly 3 a.m. The Statue of Liberty couldn’t be overrated — she was beautiful as she stood quietly over the water. The lights of Manhattan blurred in the distance and made the city look like a jewel box.
Parts of the summer come to my mind like color slides: Nureyev at the Metropolitan: fireworks over the Hudson: galleries in Soho; the children of Chinatown: and the music and lights of Broadway. I tried punk make-up (sans the popular parakeet-colored hair) and discoed at Roseland. We went to Coney Island and Picasso: I heard the Waverly Consort and the Iron City House Rockers. I went to St. Patrick’s Cathedral and once, inadvertently, to a Gay church.
The steps outside the Metropolitan Museum hosted an informal weekend pageant of entertainers: magicians, mimes, bands, jugglers and even a goldfish salesman. Once a visiting friend from Houston, Cheryl Moore ’79, sat with me on the long white steps. I was drinking a Coke, she was eating a hot-dog, and we didn’t pay much attention when a bus pulled to the curb in front of us.
About forty Korean men, most carrying cameras, filed out of the bus and huddled together, whispering. Then one sauntered over next to Cheryl and sat down. His buddy snapped his picture. Another took a seat next to me, click. Soon we were surrounded by smiling Koreans. “You don’t mind, please,” they would say, “we like picture with Ah-mary-can girls?” We didn’t mind, we said, as long as they would snap a few with Cheryl’s camera. Eventually, without ever entering the museum, they climbed merrily back aboard their Greyhound and rode away.
I was busy every minute, and before I realized it, the summer had spun away. I was anxious to go home, yet sad to leave. August 23 was like a scene from a movie— I hailed a taxi from the curb, stole a good-bye kiss from Billboard, and to the cigar- clenching driver said only, “La Guardia, please.” When the cab door slammed, my episode in The Apple was over.
It may be months before I cease to preface my sentences with “When I was in New York . . . but when I helped swing my heavy blue suitcases and Smith-Corona into our car trunk, the thick Texas heat felt heavenly. It was a fantasy island summer, but after ten weeks in “the city that never sleeps,” I was thrilled to be home. Someday, I hope I’ll go back to New York, at least for a visit, but I’m planted in Waco for my senior year. I can tell all the stories I want about my summer, but Baylor cashiers still refuse to cash my checks with a Time Inc. I.D.
