Always as a Writer

“What you’re seeing is a picture of a guy who is just sort going from one aspect of the business to another,” says John. "But it was always as a writer."

“It’s sort of just a bunch of things I fell into. I intended to be a doctor. I went to college at Harvard with medicine in mind, but I’m terrible at math and nearly flunked chemistry. It wasn’t long before I discovered that the sciences were not the way for me to go. I retreated into the English Department thinking ‘this is really cheating, this is stuff I like to do anyhow’. You’re supposed to go to school to suffer right?”

John Poppy was born in Prague in 1935. His father was Czech and his mother was American, and together they fled to the United States in 1938, one year before the Czechoslovakian government went into exile.

“It began to look like a good time to get out of Czech Slovakia,” John says. “We settled-in on a dairy farm on the east coast, right where Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware come together. The closest town was Wilmington Delaware.”

“My father was a refugee. He had been through World War I, and then World War II. He told me that doctors will always be in need and I wanted to help people. Now that I was in the English Department at Harvard, I knew that I could either be a writer or a teacher. I just wasn’t suited for academia. I wanted the real world, gritty experience.

In between his junior and senior years in college, John got a temporary position temporary working several different beats at the Wilmington Morning News, covering for ‘real’ reporters while they were on vacation.

“For two weeks I’d be the police reporter, then for two weeks I’d be the city hall reporter, then for two weeks I’d be something else…I didn’t like the cops very much,” John says. “I liked the City Hall and I liked the schools. I began to see myself as some kind of a feature writer for education and politics. That convinced me I was a newspaper man.”

The next summer, after graduation, they offered John a general assignment job, reporting, for 100-dollars a week. “After a couple years, for various reasons, some of them professional some of them personal, I decided to move onto New York.

The Executive Editor at the Wilmington Morning News used to work at the New York Herald Tribune, and he was supposed to have some connections there that would help John get started in New York.

“It turned out that they couldn’t. These New York newspaper editors just laughed when I showed up. ‘What you had two-years experience on some little paper in Wilmington? Go away!’”

After about six ugly weeks in search employment, John was flopping at a friend’s house for free and there was no money coming in. Then, a friend from college, who was sort of looking out for him at the time, started running a literary agency that he inherited from his father. “He was well connected. He called me up one day and said: ‘Hey, I just heard about a job at Look Magazine for a fact-checker in the Sports Department. I said: ‘Fact-checker? I am writer!’ He said: ‘Oh, a rich writer?’ So, I called.”

John interviewed with Patricia Carbine, who, according to John, was one of the few women that held a position of Managing Editor at a national magazine at the time. “This was 1960. It was pretty much a boys club. She was a smart, tough, brilliant woman. Smart enough to hire me!” John says cheeringly. “She later helped Gloria Steinem start Ms. Magazine.” He spent about a year doing sports-research and fact-checking. “They would give me some paragraphs to do, or a caption or something, to train me,” John says. One thing is for sure, he didn’t intend to spend the rest of his life looking-up batting averages.

John was promoted to Assistant Editor within a year. At Look, Assistant Editor really meant a Senior Writer who did most of his own editing.

“Look called their writers editors because we did do a lot of story construction. We actually went out and traveled with a photographer. We would just go and stay with people until we became invisible, and they would say things that were useful and you could really try to get the sense of them into your article. When you did that, as a writer you were not only taking notes and preparing to write the text for the piece, but you were also collaborating with the photographer, and with the art director to construct the finished product, that way everybody is moving in the same direction but bringing their own expertise.”

A couple of years later, the Editor-in-Chief called John up to his office. John was a little nervous because this boss was the kind that you only bump into in the hall. He ended up being asked how he’d like to move to San Francisco for a year and take a promotion to Senior Editor and become the Bureau Chief in San Francisco.

“At that time, San Francisco was still kind of a mythic city to people who lived out on the east coast,” John says. “The Embarcadero style high-rises hadn’t gone up so it was still a romantic little city.”

John was supposed to be on a one year tour in California. He never moved back. “I Got married, a year after I got here; settled in with a family; worked at Look, says John. “It was probably one of the most exciting times for a journalist on the west coast. In the ‘60s there was the free-speech movement at Berkeley, there was the Summer of Love, and there was all the music! All sorts of stuff was going on here. A real revolution in culture.”

“Look would send you anywhere in the world, if you thought up a story. If you thought it up and they bought it, it was yours,” John smiles. “The first story I remember doing when I first got out here was a civil rights story on location in the south.”

John married his boss, George Leonard’s, sister. “George and I became very good friends. We would go out to lunch together, and walk around the city and look at each other and say ‘this is the best job you could have’. It was an ideal job. It was really nice. It’s too bad the magazine couldn’t compete with television. Television killed off Life, Look, and various other magazines. They just didn’t know how to adapt.”

35 million people read look. It was a magazine that spoke to the middle class about life in America (teacher of the year, a college student profile, some celebrity stuff). The magazine was started in Des Moines, Iowa, so it had that Midwestern, earnest, kind of ‘Here’s how we live’ sort of feel to it. Look folded in 1971 and John had quit a year earlier, seeing the writing on the wall. He wanted to get set up as a freelancer or something before the party was over.

“Look was very generous,” says John. “After I left, they gave me a lot of freelance assignments which served as a nice cushion between what I had thought was going to be a lifetime job, going from a Senior Editor of Look to just another freelancer.”

“Having a resume that said you were a senior editor at a big magazine like Look, even though it was dead, meant that people thought you knew something about publishing. I did some consulting until along came another magazine called The Saturday Review, which was born as The Saturday Review of Literature, which was started and run by a guy named Norman Cousins. It was a high-brow magazine. They decided to split it up into four distinct magazines. There was one about politics, one about science, one about education, and one about its original charter, the arts. It was really confusing if you were a subscriber. They wanted me to edit the one about the arts, even though I had asked for politics or education. I didn’t know anything about the arts. They said: ‘This is creative casting. We don’t want somebody who is already in bed with all of the museum directors’”

He went to New York for five-months to help get the new arts magazine up and running. Then, they would move the whole magazine to San Francisco. “It was a horrible ordeal. It was a year and a half struggle to keep this magazine going and then just it went under,” John says. “At that point I thought, gee, I keep working for companies that go bankrupt, I can do that just as easily on my own, so I think I’ll freelance from here on. I did that for the next 23 years.”

“Unless you have a specialty, you have to convince some editor, somewhere, that you are the right person for that particular article and that you really know something about it,” says John, “You’re selling yourself over and over and over again.”

“Fortunately for me, around 1986, George Leonard, the guy I worked with at Look, had gone on to become a well established author. He got friendly with the people who had just bought Esquire magazine in New York. Two guys named Phillip Moffitt and Christopher Widdle; two hicks from Tennessee. They did a brilliant job of repositioning Esquire to attract young people who were interested in social trends. They decided to do a package on health and fitness. They hired George to manage the whole thing and got me to write a piece on bicycling.”

“A year later they wanted to do it again. George came to me and said: ‘This time we want to do something real big. Do a survey on all the major body systems.’ This was like writing a physiology textbook. I did this thing and it turned out to be this huge project. It eventually developed into what, if I may say so, a very impressive piece.”

The article made such a splash that the editor of Esquire asked him to write a monthly column on health for the magazine. “Well I though that was great,” says John. “It was a dream job. Steady work, plus, being a columnist for Esquire was a very good thing to be. It was fun! They still had this literary feel about them, so I was allowed to be a little bit sarcastic with it. They allowed me to speak in what I consider to be my own voice.”

“That went on for four or five years, and it finally gave me a specialty. Now I was a Health Writer, which I liked a lot because I didn’t have to flounder around reinventing myself every time I came up with a story idea.

Esquire got a new editor when the Tennessee boys sold it to the Hearst Corporation. “The new editor came in and said ‘I want my own team here’ and told me I was history. So I went Men’s Health.”

According to John, “Men’s Health has a formula that they DO NOT deviate from: sex and pecs. I did a health column for them for about a year. It ended kind of bad. The last straw was when they wanted me to write about how men can have bigger better orgasms. Not that I was prudish about it, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be ‘that guy’. I wrote what I felt was a pretty respectable article about the whole thing, and they went and added and subtracted things that made it quite something else, and with my name on it. At that point, we agreed that things weren’t really working out to well.”

Since John had become known as a Health Writer after that, he quickly got a job with a magazine called Health, which was started in 1987 by some people that he knew. It quickly became one of the most successful magazines of its type. It won some national magazine awards.

Eventually, Time Inc. came along and bought it. John was a contributing editor on contract for a certain number of articles per year. He ended up editing a book for them, which actually went very well. Health set up a publishing company that would re-purpose the magazine’s content for books and brochures. John became Editorial Director of Time Inc. Health, until the company was moved from San Francisco to Birmingham, Alabama in 2001. None of the west coast staff went along, which was probably the corporation’s intention. John began freelancing again.

In 2000, John’s wife was diagnosed with cancer. She died in August of 2003. “It was a pretty excruciating illness, John says. “During that period, I wasn’t doing a whole lot of work. Shortly after she died, my friend Bruce Anderson, who is the Editor-in-Chief of Via, and who also worked with me at Time Inc. Health, decided that he wanted an Executive Editor, which Via never had. Via was growing and becoming more ambitious. So, I looked at the requirements and it seemed like the job was tailor-made for me. I was just so heart broken by my wife.”

“Bruce told me I was a perfect fit, but I didn’t think that I could deliver the level of performance that was needed and deserved. I was kind of indifferent to life in general. But, I got over that after some talks with Bruce, and well…here I am.”

“I’m here for as long as I’m here. Bruce was very meticulous about bringing me in. I talked to everybody: the staff, my boss, my boss’ boss and his boss, all over three days, just to make sure I had a good idea of what I was getting into. I knew what I was getting into. Bruce has a lot of integrity.”

According to John, there are a lot of layers of attention that are paid to all the material that Via publishes. John’s responsibilities are: to supervise the five senior editors and the publications coordinator, concerning just about everything from scheduling to time-off. That is the corporate responsibility. He also works with the entire editorial staff on almost everything that is done for quality control. He helps them come up with story ideas and assists the Editor-in-Chief in all sorts of ways that make his life easier.

“All of the editors here are very competent and some of them brilliant,” John says. “I am here to offer a different point of view, from outside the trenches of whatever they are working on. It’s a great job, I like the people. It’s fun.”

John doesn’t often work with the freelance writers, but he writes a few articles him self every now and then; he is more of an editor’s editor; a top editor, which, he says does not mean that he’s the best editor. He comes in behind other editors and helps to bring polish to the finished product. According to John, “Editing is very favorable to freelance work. The pay is it a lot better. I saw myself as a newspaper man at first, then as a magazine writer, and more recently in the game I came into the editing business. I gradually discovered editing as being fun and satisfying.

Even though he works 50-60 hours per week and drives his two-hour commute five days a week, for John, it’s all worth it. He remembers being up at the top of Mount Tamalpais one sunny afternoon, and there was this couple there talking about how great the place was. They happened to tell John that they were locals and that they had never been up there before, but they had just read the article in Via about Mount Tam. “That makes me feel good,” John says, “when people find it useful. I just want to be useful.”

John likes stories that not only say ‘it’s a pretty place’ but that speak to why it is still there and how it ought to be preserved. According to John, “In the Bay Area, you can walk around just about any reserved place and you have to just to raise your eyes and thank heaven.”

“I very much liked the story we did on Point Reyes few years ago. Living in Marin, it’s like my back-yard, but it was a great way to take a well-known park and show the readers its virtues, and the whole idea of setting aside land like that for people to use, not to just give it up to contractors.”

John Bites

· John enjoys eating at Il Fornaio in Corte Madera, but his favorite restraint is Insalata’s in San Anselmo.

· John went to Yosemite and the Hawaiian Islands with his wife quite often until she passed. Since then, bouncing around Italy has been his favorite travel buzz.

· John once saw his dream house in the hills overlooking Sonoma, but he enjoys his house in Marin just as well. He listens to classical music, composed by the likes of Mozart and Schubert.

· John also enjoys the opera, his favorite being Marriage of Figaro.

· John subscribes the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times for delivery on the weekends, he goes to both publication’s websites during the week and he also listens to NPR every morning at breakfast. He reads The Week magazine, amongst other news weeklies and watches Jon Stewart and the Daily Show whenever he gets home in time.

“I think if you have been a professional writer, and really applied yourself to that craft, its really good training to be an editor. Also, you got to have a pathological desire to do it right,” John Poppy.