The New Yorker marks 100 years of excellence

     Chicago owes a lot to New York. We don't like to admit it, but it's true. This place was pretty much started by New York land speculators. Our first mayor, William B. Ogden, was a New York lawyer sent to check on his brother's real estate holdings. He stuck around and put his bets on the new railroad, while St. Louis was doubling down on riverboats.
     We still use nicknames that New Yorkers gave us, like "Windy City," describing, not the winter gales, but our blasts of ballyhoo trying to snag the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition.
     And "Second City" — the title of a three-part backhand A. J. Liebling published in The New Yorker in 1952, a gleeful vivisection of Chicago as a dreary cultural backwater, with bad plays, lousy water and erratic garbage service. Not a proper metropolis at all, but "a theater backdrop with a city painted on it." The Loop "like Times Square and Radio City set down in the middle of a vast Canarsie."
     Chicago rolled with the criticisms. One of the many ambitious improv comedy groups that sprouted here in the 1950s took "Second City" as its proud moniker, the way gays coopted the insult "queer." And to far less renown I took an angry line scribbled on a postcard to Liebling, "You were never in Chicago," and used it as the title of my city memoir a dozen years ago.
     The New Yorker celebrates its 100th anniversary this month, and while it is off-brand for a Chicago metro columnist to note the occasion, who cares? We defy parochialism. Credit where due. What started as an arch romp for Manhattan sophisticates turned into an engine driving liberal American culture, from John Hersey's "Hiroshima" — the whole Oct. 31, 1946 issue given over to a sympathetic portrayal of a people who, months before, were being displayed solely as loathsome buck-toothed caricatures. To Ronan Farrow helping spark the Me Too movement with his 2017 expose on Harvey Weinstein.
     Too many to cite. Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" comes to mind. Busloads of masterful writers: Joseph Mitchell. J.D. Salinger. Humorists from Robert Benchley and Woody Allen to Ian Frazier and Simon Rich. Before he was on the radio, Garrison Keillor wrote for The New Yorker. Genius artists — from Saul Steinberg, no relation, alas, to Charles Addams, Bruce McCall and Roz Chast.
     The New Yorker certainly was a polestar for me — I've lived in a house that subscribed to the magazine for my entire life. My father, a proud product of the Bronx, subscribed. As a teen, I wanted to be James Thurber, and modeled myself on him so much that as college ended I didn't bother applying for a job. Somebody would introduce me to my E.B. White and I'd be on my way. As a career strategy, that worked about as well as you'd expect.
     Writing my first book, a history of college pranks, the question arose whether to write the chapter on Caltech's Ditch Day using the mass of information already written about it, or spend a chunk of my advance getting to Pasadena for the day of pranks. "What would John McPhee do?" I asked myself, then booked a flight.
     At least that got published. Battering myself against the barred door of The New Yorker was the same futile effort for me that it was for most writers who miss the mark. Except for one short story, "Mascots Reign at Fall Show," a parody of the trade shows I covered at McCormick Place. The British quarterly Granta accepted, then rejected it. Which emboldened me to dare send it to The New Yorker.
     An editor, Dan Menaker called me at home. I remember where I was standing when I got the call. The story, he said, is terrific — it reminded him of Donald Barthelme. I hung up the phone and let out a scream. We worked together on it for a few weeks. But in the end Tina Brown didn't like it. I kept sending in new work, not realizing I'd already had my Moonlight Graham moment. The rest of the submissions got increasingly formal rejections. But that one story, for one moment. "It was like coming this close to your dreams, then having them brush past you, like a stranger in a crowd," Burt Lancaster says in 'Field of Dreams." "I thought 'They'll be other days' I didn't realize, that was the only day."

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