ALMOST GOLDEN
This, to my regret, is scheduled to be the last "Audio ETC." After
49 continuous years with Audio, this is a thing I am not yet able to believe,
though I am trying. So it is farewell.
We are all numerologists at heart. A few years back, I realized that my genes for aging were out of sync-I didn't feel half as old as I ought to, nor do I now. And so my numerical sense began craving for a 50th anniversary! So soon. And especially considering that Audio would also reach its 50th at the same time, at which point I might retire in the grandest numerical glory while helping the magazine celebrate as only I can do-the sole living member of the original Audio team and still in astonishingly good health. Well, numbers or no, it seems this is not to be. My Friday the 13th is 49. And so I join the intrepid California Gold Rush Forty-Niners, who could not wait for 50 either.
Enough lamenting. I do not feel any need to defend this column, which has veered more and more to ward person al audio history as time has marched on. Events that, for me, were simply everyday when they occurred now seem to be incredibly distant and for gotten, ripe for renewal and for re valuation. So, in that mode, I bring you our Beginning as perhaps only I remember it within the audio community.
It was not the first time I had witnessed a special phenomenon, an established organization giving shelter to a fledgling enterprise desperately in need of support in order to get started. In 1924 my literary father founded The Saturday Review of Literature in New York, breaking away from the then conservative New York Post, where he had edited a weekly Literary Review. The Post was sold; the new owners promptly tossed out The Literary Review. Now, my Dad was the smoothest raiser of hard cash that I have ever known. In no time he got the money he needed, walked away from The Post with his entire staff intact, and started a new sheet-almost overnight-in the very image of the old. In no time it was well established, too, with spacious (relatively) offices and a dignified newspaper format. Money helps.
Only a short time later, Henry Seidel Canby (that is, Dad) was visited by a group of young men who had been his students at Yale University.
They had a brand new magazine idea but absolutely no means to carry it out-could he advise? Yes. But what they most urgently needed (of course) was a place to work, one where they could hatch their unborn baby. My father was sympathetic, and in short order this junior crowd moved right into a spare room or two in The Saturday Review offices.
There they stayed for a considerable time until they could afford a work place of their own. The new baby was christened Time, the Weekly News Magazine.
Audio? Move forward some 20 years to that turbulent, expansive period right after World War II, when at last "the duration," as we liked to call it, ended. Then all heaven broke loose! Four years of enormous exertion dedicated only to war work had stalled progress in every sort of civilian area. Everything had been "frozen"-either suppressed, rationed, or fixed in a prewar mode.
The first issue of this magazine, then called Audio Engineering, appeared in May 1947. As you can imagine, it was a remark ably early example of the new urge to catch up. (The first new cars, merely repeats of 1941 models, came in 1948.) Before that May, planning and production obviously had taken quite a while, though we were actually a conversion of an earlier and long time mag called Radio, with which our new Managing Editor and driving force (later Editor and Publisher), C. G. McProud, had been associated.
And so, January, 49 years ago this month.
Thinking must have begun even before that time and, I feel sure, was largely due to McProud's vision and drive, though others obviously were aware that a new and separated technological area within the electrical field, audio, was overdue.
Audio? Where the term came from I do not know. Certainly I had never heard it be fore I met McProud, also early in 1947. Certainly, too, it was unknown to a public that had bought millions of phonographs and radios with "audio" inside! And unknown to most engineers as well. So our name, Audio Engineering, was a bold and forward-looking title for a new technical/consumer magazine.
But there was more to our Beginning, and mine with it-a surprise to many now though no more than everyday common knowledge in the field when it happened.
There is a similarity between our then title and that of the organization called the Audio Engineering Society (AES). And that is no coincidence.
McProud was always scheming and was a calculated step or more ahead of himself in his pragmatic thinking. This was no idealist! He was a tough hombre when he wanted to be, which was often enough, and as ruthless as the next operator in any argument. But he had a most curious farsightedness that isn't supposed to go with such operators-rather with intellectuals, artists, and such. Otherwise, you understand, I would not have had the slightest chance of becoming a member of the audio community at that time.
McProud merely heard me one day on my (live) WNYC radio program, a commentary on music (strictly classical), with 78-rpm records for illustrations. Within minutes, I like to think, he located me by phone and asked me over to his place, only a few blocks away. I remember nothing of that interview except McProud's Siamese cats, which when Mac said "Pssst" would simultaneously jump 6 feet in the air. No matter. I was in! And very soon Audio Engineering took off, making an auspicious beginning.
At the same time, one other group of engineers-no, not young college grads this time-was working on a parallel idea for a new organization closely related, the AES. And who was right in there but McProud. The idea was a splendid one, actually, and at a very favorable moment, but the gentlemen lacked the wherewithal to launch such an expensive operation. More to the point, they desperately needed what every professional organization must have, an official journal.
I do not think they had to ask McProud and our new magazine for help. I expect he offered it, very quickly. This was part of his larger plan. By no means did all of his grand and pragmatic ideas come off, but this one did. The magazine Audio Engineering, this very magazine, became the official Journal of the nascent Audio Engineering Society. A separate section of each issue was prepared by the founders of the new Society, an organization still in the trauma of birth, like Time in the '20s. I wonder how many of to day's AES officers are aware of this history.
Of the three AES titles that are presently mine, the first, Charter Member, was not my idea. McProud required it-or, should I say, ordered it. At that stage the Society was looking for names, I guess, and the more the better. My other two titles are another story-Fellow of the AES and, of course, through the passage of time, Life Member.
As you may imagine, the AES Journal in our magazine lasted only as long as was comfortably needed for the AES to establish its own publication, exactly as with Time and The Saturday Review. In both cases the contribution to what became two enormous enterprises was crucially helpful, if on a minuscule scale.
I wickedly think that C. G. McProud hoped to keep our connection going indefinitely, to the greater glory of his magazine.
But that was only human, an understand able part of a sometimes vaulting ambition.
For all his scheming, he was the hardest worker I have ever known. In his first years as Publisher, he practically put the magazine together himself, by hand-then, often after midnight, he would stash the copy into his big Cadillac and drive all night from Mineola, far out on Long Island, to (I think) York, Pennsylvania, where he would oversee the actual press operation the next day. That was part of the plan too.
The conversion of our title to plain Audio was cleverly managed in a way that has al ways made me laugh. Instead of a dramatic (or not so dramatic) overnight change, the word "Engineering" simply began to shrink on the cover, while the other word, "Audio," got bigger and bigger. In a painlessly short time, "Engineering" faded away, and when it vanished nobody even noticed.
At my own 49th anniversary, I wish I could depart as painlessly! Not possible but, anyhow, happy 50th to all and-so long.
(by: EDWARD TATNALL CANBY; adapted from Audio magazine, Jan. 1996)
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