Long Life

In 1882 a young man named Joseph Ames Mitchell, who had $10,000 and could draw pictures, went to his good friend Henry Holt, the book publisher, and asked help in publishing a humorous magazine. Publisher Holt demurred, advised his young friend to forget it. But Artist Mitchell, who had no business training or experience, was determined. With his $10,000 he launched the magazine himself, called it Life. Publisher Holt dubbed the first issue "Short Life." good-naturedly bought a full-page advertisement. This week the staff of 'Life celebrated the soth anniversary of the day--Jan. 4. 1883-- when the first issue was bundled out of a small studio on Broadway.

In the anniversary number. Editor George Teeple Eggleston resisted the temptation to fill the book with reprints of 50-year-old drawings and text. The cover is a dainty color-photograph of a group modelled in soap by Lester Gaba--a girl of the iSSo's and' a modern girl (platinum blonde) raising goblets to the famed Life cherub. The body of the magazine looks like a normal current issue with these exceptions: Frontispiece is a reproduction of the first cover, drawn by Artist Mitchell--a pen-&-ink sketch showing Father Time fiddling while two exceedingly fat cherubs dance together between the letters of LIFE, the whole against an elysian landscape.

A few advertisements of 1883 are reprinted: a rococo display of Colgate & Co., one for "The Only Genuine Vichy" (both advertisers today), Ausable's "Popular Horse Nail." and a "Combined Sofa & Bath Tub. The Common Sense Invention of the Age."

One member of Life's present staff was at the birth. He is Associate Editor Edward Sandford Martin, who celebrated his 77th birthday two days before the magazine's Golden Jubilee. E. S. Martin was Life's first editor, and a part owner but was stricken with malaria and had to quit after the first six months. Three or four years later he resumed work as editorial writer, wrote regularly for the next 40 years until Editor Norman Hume Anthony, now of Ballyhoo, took the editorship of Life in 1929 for a brief tenure. Lloyd George had called E. S. Martin "the greatest editorial writer using the English language today"; Anthony threw out the Martin editorials because they were "lousy." The Martin editorials have been resumed since then and E. S. Martin should reinstate reference to Life in his 25-line biography in Who's Who--a biography which lists 17 books of verse and essays, and which notes his authorship of "The Editor's Easy Chair" department in Harper's. He goes to Life's office punctually once a week to deliver his editorials, spends much of his time in his Manhattan house which is specially wired for him to plug in, in almost any corner, a device to aid his hearing.

Founder Mitchell it was who ignited and kept ablaze Life's longtime antivivisection campaign. A Mitchell drawing which, for a time, appeared in nearly every issue showed a man whose head was drawn far back by a cruel harness. Standing caption: "If good for a horse, why not for a man?" Founder Mitchell originated Life's famed Fresh Air Fund, which still gives summer holidays to 300 children, girls on a Connecticut farm, boys on .the onetime estate of "Diamond Jim" Brady in New Jersey. Another hardy Mitchell perennial was the "safe & sane Fourth."

Mitchell's seven-year study of art in Paris made him partial to the French. Life was violently pro-Allies from the moment the War broke out, and was first and loudest in demanding U. S. entry. Woodrow Wilson considered Life one of the most influential magazines in the U. S. (It was E. S. Martin who with the late Walter Hines Page, then editor of World's Work, introduced Colonel House to Wilson.)

Following Mitchell's death in 1918 Life was acquired by its famed contributor, Artist Charles Dana Gibson, who has now retired to his painting in Maine, lost active interest in the magazine. Two months ago full ownership passed to Publisher Clair Maxwell and Treasurer Henry Richter.

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