David W. Dunlap is a Metro reporter and writes the Building Blocks column. He has worked at The Times for 40 years.
Many readers are wondering what The Times will be like without the Home section, which is ending its run on Thursday, just shy of its 38th anniversary. Dean Baquet, the executive editor, said last week that “coverage from the Home section would fit best in other parts of The Times, including Food and Real Estate”
In 1977, many readers were wondering what The Times would be like with the Home section. And the Living section. And the Weekend section.
The answer wasn’t pretty.
Noting how the publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, made a nightly habit of reading the first edition of the paper, Time magazine said his routine was being disrupted. “Visions of vegetables dance in his sleepless
head, along with recipes for pork chops liégeoise, treatises on termite detection, shopping guides to $44 canvas bags and $1,850 ‘Love’ pendants from Tiffany.”
The article didn’t stop there. Grumbled the newsroom: “A hapless reporter … was sent to cover a flower show for Living, missed the crucial unveiling of a new strain of begonia and, as punishment, was made a foreign correspondent.”
The debate, inside and outside 229 West 43rd Street, could have been torn from today’s headlines (or today’s SEO).
To save its own life, The Times was trying to win readers it knew it ought to have who weren’t finding what they wanted among its current offerings. Yet as it expanded features and trimmed traditional coverage, The Times still hoped to maintain the gravity and authority that were its stock in trade.
The service sections immediately served the first goal. Readership and advertising increased noticeably on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. But critics were not persuaded in 1977 that The Times had pulled off the second part of the trick.
“The privileged preoccupations of the service sections,” New York magazine wrote, contributed to a growing “image of The Times caught up in a kind of middle-class self-absorption that appeared frivolous
against New York’s crumbling cityscape.”
Home leaves a more distinguished legacy than that. “Over the years — most recently under the leadership of Noel Millea — Home has done a magnificent job capturing trends in home design and architecture,” Mr. Baquet told the staff on Feb. 27. “It has featured some of our biggest stars, including Suzanne Slesin and Penelope Green.”
It did so from the very first issue on March 17, 1977, which was led by a surprisingly personal and revealing essay by the Pulitzer-winning architecture critic, Ada Louise Huxtable, on the New York dwellings that she and her husband, Garth, had called home. (Who knew she spent seven years in Elmhurst, Queens?) Her colleague and successor, Paul Goldberger, took issue a few pages later with what had seemed to be the delightful idea of painting the Ward’s Island pedestrian bridge in bright colors.
Joan Kron answered the curiosity of readers about the apricot-colored wing chairs in which President Jimmy Carter and Walter Cronkite had been seated for a televised call-in program, “Ask President Carter.” The fabric turned out to be Brunschwig & Fils orange Marienbourg damask (cotton, rayon and linen). And it had been discontinued, to the relief of the CBS producer, who said the upholstery “looked like used salmon.”
Lois Gould, the author of “Such Good Friends,” initiated the Hers column by wrestling painfully with whether to support a pornographer’s First Amendment right to publish, even though his magazine was “more than merely disgusting,” but a “weapon and a textbook” teaching “that women are consumer goods — silly putty toys with replaceable parts, or snack foods with flavors enhanced by artificial spice and color.”
Perhaps the lightest touch in the inaugural issue came from William Zinsser, the author of “On Writing Well,” who described the jogging phenomenon that was overrunning New Haven, especially residential neighborhoods where joggers from Yale headed because there weren’t many cars to hit them. “I suspect that cars stay out of the whole area to keep from being hit by joggers,” Mr. Zinsser wrote.
It took a while for the service sections to feel fully grafted, and they offered material enough for satirists until they did. The most memorable take-off was a hybrid Home and Living section called the Having section. It was folded into the brilliant Not The New York Times parody published during the 1978 newspaper strike.
“Insulating With Paté: Winter Warmth With Good Taste,” was one of the offerings, as was a guide to the best squeegee windshield washers in the city. From the food side: “Chauve-souris, or bat, long considered inedible, is regaining the culinary esteem it enjoyed during the Dark Ages.”
The lede story of the section concerned a decorating craze featuring newsstands taken from the streets and installed in collectors’ homes. “The Newest Antique,” the headline said.
Not funny then. Not funny now.