The Center for Oral History at Columbia University, founded in 1948, is an archive of thousands of recordings of interviews with a wide range of public figures. On May 4, 1956 they conducted an interview with Waldo Bowman, editor-in-chief of ENR from 1940 to 1963. The two interviewers were Harlan Buddington Phillips and Roger Burlingame. Phillips, who received a PhD in history from Columbia in 1954, conducted many interviews for the Center. Burlingame was a prolific author of biographies and other nonfiction books. At the time he was writing a book on the history of McGraw Hill, which was published in 1959 as “Endless Frontiers.” The McGraw-Hill Publishing Company owned ENR at that time.
Bowman: I graduated in civil engineering and had every intention of being a civil engineer. As a matter of fact, I worked for two years in civil engineering. Then I decided that I should have some business background. I quit engineering and went to Harvard Business School, still with every intention of going back to civil engineering. The summer at Harvard, between the two years, I needed a job. When I was in college I had learned more from Engineering News-Record then I had from my textbooks. I had read it in the library and had been imbued with the idea that this was the one magazine you should read. My professors told me that. I thought, “Here I am in the East, in Boston. Why don’t I go down and see if I can get a job on Engineering News-Record”. All I wanted was money then. I came down and there wasn’t any job. However, I was fortunate in getting to talk to Colonel Chevalier, who was then business manager of Engineering News-Record. I became more interested and went back to school. I still read Engineering News-Record at Harvard in the library. Sometime later in the year there was an ad in the magazine, and since I was still running out of money I applied for the job. That’s how I came to McGraw-Hill.
Phillips: Had you had any writing experience prior to this?
Bowman: I had had no writing experience, but I liked writing and I had done well in English and whatever writing an engineer gets, which is not too much perhaps. I also had had some interest in advertising, and there was some possibility that I might go into the sales engineering or advertising departments of the company I had been with before I went to Harvard. That might have been a directing influence. I don’t know. In any event, circumstances brought me here, and I have been here ever since.
I might say that I haven’t changed my opinion that Engineering News-Record is a magazine from which one can learn a great deal, and since I’ve been here we’ve tried to keep it that way. I had a high regard for it at the time, and I have a high regard for it now—quite naturally perhaps.
Phillips: You simply answered an ad in the book?
Bowman: In Engineering News-Record itself. This was in 1925.
Phillips: What was the paper like then?
Bowman: Well, of course I didn’t know much about publishing. I didn’t know what kind of a magazine it was compared with other magazines. Nor did I know why it was the way it was, what its philosophy was. That philosophy was soon a part of me and perhaps had been before, but I hadn’t known it. It was a magazine for engineers and contractors, the construction industry, and a magazine of technical guidance for them, how to design a structure, the technique of building a structure. There were some fringe benefits—if you want to call them that—in the way of costs and bid prices, certain business information, certain general engineering and construction news of happenings in the field.
That had been the pattern of the magazine since it had been started and of both of its predecessor magazines. Engineering News, when it was started, was called the Engineer and the Surveyor. After it had been going a year, they changed the name to Engineering News. That was the Hill people. It started in 1874. In 1878, Mr. McGraw, or rather his predecessors, started Engineering Record which was called the Plumber and the Sanitary Engineer. It was changed some years later, 1890 I guess it was, to Engineering Record. Then competition began. Here were these two big magazines, Engineering News and Engineering Record, each of them a technical magazine helping the readers in their particular technical specialty. The Record had started out as the Plumber and Sanitary Engineer, but it soon changed to more of a construction paper for the contractor, no matter what he was building, whether it was sanitary facilities, railroads or what not. The News was more of a design paper. They both grew up competing with one another for advertising and subscribers, but mostly along parallel paths, and always more or less directed toward technical needs.
Burlingame: Was there great divergence editorially between the two, or did they duplicate a good deal?
Bowman: They duplicated in so far as the nature of the material was concerned. Except for outstanding jobs they didn’t always treat the same project. For example, when the Northern Pacific Railway was being built across the country, neither one of them could ignore that. But one of them would take the water supply of Dubuque, Iowa, and the other would take the water supply of Dallas, Texas. If they were going to talk about water supply, they didn’t compete; try to beat one another to the same city, or the same engineer, to get the same information. But they were rather parallel, and that was one of the reasons that they joined forces, finally. Then Mr. Hill died and that too was another reason for the merger.
This pattern continued, I suppose, over the first sixty-five years, this pattern of technical guidance, but in the meantime the construction industry had been growing tremendously. Not only had the industry been growing but also the units in it – the engineering design offices, the contractors. They were becoming big business, much more ubiquitous. They travelled all over. They were national outfits in some cases. Gradually the concept arose that we had to broaden our coverage to serve the needs of the very same people who we were serving before. That eventually came to earth in a concept that was made quite real by Bob Boger, the present publisher. I say “made real” because a lot of these things grow up and you have a hazy idea what they are, but he put it in words that we had been directing our attention to the technical needs of these readers, and therefore to a great extent to the technical people, people who were concerned with the design and the actual techniques of construction. Now, there were a lot of bosses above them, the owners of this business, and there were a lot of bosses above them, the owners of this business, and there was a publishing vacuum between the technician and the entrepreneur. This entrepreneur, the fellow who owned this designing business or construction business, was an engineer, sure, but he had grown in stature. He had to read the Wall Street Journal. He had to read a lot of other specialist magazines, too, to keep informed. There was also, in a sense, a vacuum of information in this area between the technician and the boss. Engineering News-Record is the only magazine in the field that covers the whole construction field. It always has been that way, and it still is. It was quite logical that if that was the case, it was also quite logical that Engineering News-Record should attempt to fill this vacuum. We expanded, deepened and broadened the coverage of the magazine. It goes back formally six years. The concept was growing up perhaps over the past decade.
Phillips: How did you handle the coverage of this “vacuum”?
Bowman: We actually had to increase our staff. We had to get in some new kinds of specialists. We now have a labor editor. We also have a financial editor. We always had statisticians who were concerned with costs and bid prices and estimating problems covered. The political problems are very important too—what to do, or propose to do. They are problems on which the people who are responsible for the construction industry have to be informed. They were getting that kind of information in other places if they got it. They couldn’t get it in any of their technical magazines. If there is a change in concept, and basically there is in Engineering News-Record, it is that formerly we published information to aid the practitioners in the construction industry in their technical decisions. What we try to do now is publish the information that will be useful on every kind of a decision that a man operating in this field needs to make in his business. At any time in the day at this desk, when he needs information of the type that a magazine can supply, it should be in Engineering News-Record so that he doesn’t have to go to Business Week, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, or Water Works Engineering, or something else like that.
The magazine physically reflects that change in the sense that there used to be three or four pages of news. These were just little spot news items, things that had happened the past week. Then that was followed by feature articles. All of the feature articles were technical stories. Now, it is an integrated magazine from cover to cover. It’s hard to tell what might be called a news story from a feature story. There are some differences. There are more pictures and drawings, for example, in a technical feature story. On the other hand, a news story is apt to be the biggest story in the book. It used to be the other way around, exclusively. Then the fringe benefits, the tail on the dog, was in the news and material of that kind. Now, all the context is considered of equal importance.
A part of this new concept has been that instead of giving the reader just the facts, we try to give him background as well. Take a story on a building that fell down in Pittsburgh and killed ten people. We try to publish a great deal of background material about similar failures in this same story so that you’ve got some kind of perspective. Then there are stories that we call enterprise stories where we make the news ourselves. For example, we decided three or four weeks ago that they weren’t developing enough apprentices in the construction industry. The labor unions were all getting to be groups of old men, and this apprentice system that they talk about just wasn’t producing enough apprentices. We took that as a subject, went out to talk to people, contractors, labor people, asking “What’s the problem here? Why don’t we have more apprentices? What can we do about it?” It made quite a story, a story that would not have existed if we hadn’t enterprised it. We try to keep three or four of those things in the air all the time. The enterprise story, and the roundup story like this failure story, or a roundup as to how housing is coming along, are two types of stories that we now publish and previously did not. Their real purpose is to aid in this decision forming on the part of the reader, to give him information that can help him in making certain decisions in his day to day business.
Phillips: Has this changing concept made for any changes in the staff?
Bowman: There are more people on the staff who are not technically trained engineers. It’s a larger staff than it was, perhaps twice as large. It is perhaps one third writers. They’re specialists, not only technical specialists, [but also] labor and general news, economics, and things of that sort. The latter do not require that a man be a civil engineer. On the other hand, two thirds of our staff are graduate civil engineers, and that is absolutely necessary. Basically the reason that there are labor problems, economic problems, legal problems, all these things, on the part of people in the industry is because they are attempting to do technical things. They’re trying to build a building, or a highway. That’s their read objective in their job, but all these other things have to be done in order to accomplish that. Those things were also true fifty years ago, but they were on a much smaller scale. In any event there was no technical magazine treating them.
Phillips: You have in addition some sixty-five correspondents spread out through the nation.
Bowman: That is the next step in this kind of publishing service, it requires speed and it requires coverage. In the old days correspondence was perfectly satisfactory. If you were publishing only technical stories, say on something like Hoover Dam, it didn’t make any difference whether you published a story of how they poured concrete this week, or next month. It was still news, if it hadn’t been published before. This is still true on many technical stories, but with the concept of giving a person as much information as possible on current happenings and their background so that he can make decisions, there is an urgency about his having this information and so we have had to greatly expand our news gathering facilities. Thus backing up this editorial staff setup we have these sixty-five news correspondents. They are in some cases engineers. They might be connected with a highway department, or a city engineering department, but in the big majority of cases they are newspaper people, real estate editors, maybe labor editors on the big dailies. Most of these correspondents are in the state capitals, or in the large cities. We do a great deal of telephone and telegraph operation with these people that we never did before, and we use the teletype among our other offices where we do have editors. Engineering News-Record has an editor in Chicago and San Francisco and has had them for forty years or so—longer than any other McGraw-Hill paper.
Phillips: Construction is going on all over the world. How do you keep abreast of this news?
Bowman: The company has a setup, has had since the war, the World-News Bureau. It has full time people in half a dozen cities at least, and many more stringers. If we want something from any place in the world, we transmit the request to World-News. If we want it in a hurry, the story is returned by cable. If we don’t, they write us airmail.
Burlingame: They keep telling you what’s going on the day?
Bowman: They’re supposed to. They do to a certain extent, but there are thirty-five McGraw-Hill magazines in as many specialist fields. You put a fellow over in Vienna, or Berlin, and something could be going on right under his nose in one of these fields, and he wouldn’t know it, wouldn’t appreciate it. They need a great deal of guidance from here. We take a good many foreign publications which our specialist editors read. When they come across something that is going on abroad, why they query World-News to go around and get a story and pictures on this particular development.
Phillips: What frame of reference do you put out from, let’s say, a stringer in Africa who may not know any civil engineering at all. He has a nose for news, but how do you help guide him with references to the building of a dam?
Bowman: You can’t. He has to be just a reporter and he has to put himself in the hands of the man he’s interviewing. If he can get to the dam, or to the engineer, he can sit down and talk to him. He can say, “Why is this thing interesting? How did you build it? What are you proud of? What do you think is new about it?” As a reporter he can ferret out quite a little information this way. Then it comes in here, and it usually is naively written from a technical standpoint. It’s perfectly good for a newspaper, but we usually have to rewrite it, or go back and ask him for more information.
I have done a good deal of foreign travel, and on all of these foreign trips I’ve made it a point to spend quite a little time with these World News people and have attempted to educate them in construction and civil engineering as well as to introduce them to people that I know in these different countries.
Phillips: Would it be fair to say that your interest in a dam in Africa is not in the fact of its construction, but what about that dam was different, what the problems were that had to be handled?
Bowman: There are two reasons why we are interested in foreign construction. One is if an American engineer or contractor is engaged in it. Then it becomes news anyway, just the same as it would be in the United States—perhaps a little more so because the fact that he is an American working in a foreign country is a matter of news, a matter of interest to his competitors or to people who maybe think “Perhaps I should try to get some of this work over there.” The second reason is the one that you mention. We’re interested in a dam in India if in its design or construction, have they done something that could be used by American engineers here in this country. That is becoming more important right at the moment than it was immediately after the war. There were a good many more Americans abroad then than there are now. We have a great many more sources of information abroad than we ever had before.
There might be a third type of foreign information that we would publish – economic information or programs for development in these countries. Burma comes up with a large public works program. It plans to build highways, ports and other things. That’s a matter of business news to some Americans. Right now the Germans, the French, and the Swedes are our competitors. What they are doing is a matter of business information for American concerns who might want to get some of this work too.
Phillips: How do you see the reader reaction to this foreign coverage?
Bowman: Our reader reaction is really quite good. A lot of it is just general interest of the kind that prompts people to read the National Geographic Magazine. They may never go to Tibet, but they are intrigued by it. Many of our people will read a foreign article where they don’t have any business interest in it. They reaction to the international section is better than one might think just from the number of people who are vitally interested in going abroad.
Phillips: I wonder if we could now jump back and illustrate some of the readership problems, as you saw them, with the advent of Construction Methods. [Construction Methods was a separate construction magazine published by McGraw Hill from 1919 to 1978.]
Bowman: In this field of construction, under the concept that Engineering News-Record was being operated on at that time, there was a great diversity of interest and problems between the designer on the one hand and the construction man on the other. They had many common interests but they also had problems that were not so common. For one thing there wasn’t space in Engineering News-Record to bring in these other people, the small contractor, the field man. I won’t say that they couldn’t read, but they wouldn’t read. The concept was to publish a picture magazine where there was more done with pictures than there was with text. Engineering News-Record was too erudite, heavy maybe, for those people, yet they bought it and influenced the buying of considerable construction equipment and materials. Either they were owners of small businesses, had a power shovel or two and a small truck, or they were superintendents or foremen way down the line in the larger construction companies. The idea was that to publish a magazine for these people would be a good thing, and that we’d make it more pictures and less text. News-Record would be more text and less pictures. The two magazines would supplement one another. You would have one level of readership for Construction Methods. The two of them together would cover a big segment of the construction industry. They’ve been operated largely on that kind of a theory ever since. The theory changed at times. There’s got to be more text in Construction Methods, but it is a field man’s magazine.
Burlingame: This is an unfair question to ask an editor. How would the advertising distribute itself among the two magazines?
Bowman: Naturally, in the field of construction equipment there was duplication. That was foreseen, and that was all right. The advertiser was getting, in a certain sense, the boss in News-Record and the lower echelon people in Construction Methods, but he was also getting many bosses of construction jobs in Methods whereas in News Record there were a lot of too. There was no conflict so far as materials advertising was concerned because the News-Record engineer reader largely determines what material goes in a structure whether steel, cement, concrete, plastics, or whatever, but the power shovels and the tractors were in both magazines, which thus operated a little bit as General Motors does, selling Pontiacs and Buicks at the same time. Divisions of readers between the two magazines will also be determined by the fact that there are certain people on the same level of intelligence and education who have different reading devices. One group would rather read one type of magazine and another group the other type.
From a publishing standpoint, Construction Methods also filled one of these vacuums that I was speaking of, which we are trying to fill in News-Record. If we hadn’t started such a magazine somebody else would have started it. So in a sense we were preempting a section of the construction information field that was logical for us to serve, yet which will be difficult for us to serve with ENR. It needed to be served and ostensibly it could be made profitable. It wasn’t profitable for a good many years except as for keeping somebody else out of this field. It didn’t make a lot of money, but it now does. It is a very successful magazine, and all of this had occurred without damaging News-Record in any sense. Quite the contrary, we’ve got in Engineering News-Record a most remarkable magazine. It’s very difficult for an editor, or an advertising manager, or a publisher to do any great damage to it in a short time because its reputation is so high, and it’s been a sort of bible for so many years that its prestige is something I still marvel at. Its reputation began way back in the early days, and it has continued. We try to justify it, but a lot of it is momentum. It just continues to be momentum.
Phillips: Is Engineering News-Record regarded as a horizontal publication? The reason I ask is this. The day before yesterday we talked to a man in a horizontal filed and the attempt there to split off and publish two magazines proved unsuccessful.
Bowman: What magazine?
Phillips: This was Power and Operation Engineer.
Bowman: This has been a debatable question – to fit magazines to a definition of what is horizontal and what is vertical. If construction is a function, an operation like power, you can say Engineering News-Record is a vertical publication, but you can’t really say that because construction is a whole industry. We’ve got power in construction. We’ve got transportation in construction. These are all separate little pockets, and each is served by a magazine. Roads and Street is one of the magazine, Water Works Engineering is another. All of our competition with one exception are what we would call vertical publications. We’d be a horizontal one cutting through all these specialist fields. The only one that is somewhat horizontal too, in that sense, would be Civil Engineering which is published by the American Society of Civil Engineers, yet it doesn’t go into all these business phases of construction. It doesn’t go into housing and many other things that we are concerned with. We’re a horizontal publication, but people have tried to put us in the vertical class.
Phillips: Well, it’s interesting to me because here in a horizontal field the experience of breaking off Construction Methods for the less erudite has proved successful, whereas in the same house another experiment in a horizontal field didn’t prove successful.
Bowman: Part of that can just be attributed to size. The construction field is twenty times the size of power – in people, money spent, in all sorts of things. That may be one reason that it could work.
We’ve always avoided split offs. It’s been proposed a good many times that we start other magazines in the construction field, but it’s never gotten very far because we left that construction field, but it’s never gotten very far because we felt that construction is a single industry. Now there are these specialist jobs that the industry has to do but overall you’re dealing with the same kind of money.
Public works, for example, all comes from taxes. You’re dealing with the same kind of materials the same forces of nature in designing these things. While many of the engineers are specialists, they can design right across the board. They can put themselves in these other niches. If they are highway engineers, they could get over into dams. Also so – called highway contractors can and will order things, too. Nowadays, in some of these big engineering corporations, you have departments that are devoted to highways, dams, power plants, all in the same company. Except for Construction Methods, which was started for a special reason, there has never been much temptation to splinter Engineering News-Record. The same thing is true regionally. There are many regional civil engineering construction magazines. There are only two of them that are particularly successful, one on the West Coast and one in New England. They are usually magazines that are based on bid information. A contract is coming up, when are the bids going to be called and so forth? They start out that way, and then they put in a few articles to make it look like a real magazine. On the other hand, the Western Construction on the West Coast is quite a sizable, dignified, presentable magazine, run by a former editorial staff member of News-Record, as a matter of fact. That may account for some of its success. It was started by a former McGraw-Hill advertising man, many years ago.
I have been concentrating as much as I could on this philosophy of ours—the changes that have occurred and the fact that we are in a big and fast moving industry—rather than on the magazine itself and some of the things it has done. It has done some things that it is quite proud of over many, many years. It’s always been a weekly. It started out being a weekly early. Why it started out immediately being a weekly, I don’t quite know, yet it was probably because of the information it published on bids. The quicker a reader can get that information the more apt he is to be in on the ground floor and get the job. That controlled in the beginning the fact that News-Record was a weekly. Then as the industry grew there was just so much information in it, it had to be a weekly. Now, the tempo of the industry is even faster so that you just couldn’t think of the magazine in any other way then as a weekly.
Burlingame: I’d be interested, Mr. Bowman, in some of your personal experiences in the field which apparently have been very varied and quite exciting, if you’d care to tell some stories.
Bowman: Back in 1937, or 1936, when the big New England hurricane hit, there was a big flood and lots of wind damage. News about this hurricane was part of our publishing objective to keep our people informed as to what happened over and above what they might read in their newspapers. Two of us went up to New England the very next morning by car. My companion took the shore. I went inland. Travel through that area, what with bridges out and the like, was quite pioneering. When we met later in Boston we were worn out. It was difficult to get back to New York, so we thought we would take the overnight boat to New York. It was completely filled. We went to the army engineers who more or less controlled the boat under these emergency conditions. They recognized that it was at least to their interests and the interests of the readership of the whole engineering profession that we get this material, pictures and stories, back to New York. If we didn’t get back by the next morning it wasn’t going to get in next week’s issue. They called up down at the boat and said to put us abroad with our car. We went down. They pulled off two army trucks and put us abroad. They people down at the boat didn’t understand who we were to have all of this high priority, but there was a case – it was exciting so far as we were concerned – or the standing of the magazine.
I’ve never reminisced very much about things that have happened. I’ve more or less taken them as they come along. Things that are more or less exciting— I don’t mean dangerous at all – in the construction industry are taken in stride by the engineer. You read stories in the newspapers about people crawling up on a building and so forth. To those of us who have worked in the field, this isn’t noteworthy.
That reminds me of when they put the mooring mast on top of the Empire State Building for dirigibles. You recall that big controversy. I was writing a story about the Empire State Building and was down there the day that they got this mooring mast completely finished, the framework and the last piece of steel up on top of it. I crawled up on top of that, and when you get to the top of the mooring mast, it’s like standing on this table. This was some years ago. I was younger than I am now. I climbed up. Nobody else had been up there at all. One of the steel workers had fastened this from below. I just wanted to stand higher than any other individual had ever stood at that moment. There wasn’t anything particularly dangerous about it. A big wind might have blown you off, but it was just one of those things.
Burlingame: It would have scared me to death.
Bowman: It would me now, as would the Bayonne bridge job. This was sixteen hundred and fifty feet across. They built it out from both sides and it’s one of the few arches that they built past the center before connecting the two ends. We were writing a story about it and had to get out to the point where they were closing it. I walked the full length of this top chord of that thing, about as wide as this table and a thousand feet long up hill and down. I’m not sure that I would do it now. Then, however, I’d worked with Chicago Bridge and Boston Bridge before I came here, and climbing around on steel work was no particular problem. The same thing is true of other people on the staff, too.
Some of the things that have happened to you are more exciting after they’ve happened than they are at the time they happen. During the war when I was overseas as a war correspondent for the paper I was on the Remagen Bridge that fell. It went down about two hours after I got off, but I know enough about the bridge—probably knew more about the type of bridge it was and the danger it was in than any one there—to be afraid of it. Shells had gone through members and broken them off, so all the time I was on that bridge my mind was completely active. If the bridge started to go I knew what I was going to do. It was quite obvious that if it went down it would tilt in one direction. Therefore, the place to be was on the other side so you could dive overboard. I was on there for three hours that morning, and there never was a minute when I didn’t keep myself in a position where I could run up the side and go over the balustrades because it was in a dangerous, very dangerous condition. It did go down and killed about twenty of the men on it. At the time I was thinking about this it wasn’t too exciting. All these people were risking their lives, and what with shells around and everything, one didn’t think too much about it. When I stop to think about it now, and if under similar circumstances there were a bridge that was very dangerously teetering, I think I’d let somebody else get the news. I wouldn’t go out on it.
We’ve had many editors on News-Record who have been mixed up in exciting situations which turned out to be very significant stories. Back in 1912, or somewhere around there [actually 1907], the Quebec Bridge fell down. It fell down twice. The then editor of News-Record, Schmitt, went up there and wrote the story. The story he wrote became quite a classic. Six months later the report came out as to the cause of the failure. The background of why it should have happened in the first place and the sequence of happenings as it did go down were all exactly as he had written them. A great deal of this was his own deductions and not what anybody told him. He was an engineer as well as a reporter.
In 1937, or some time about then [actually 1928], the St. Francis dam in California failed, the first time that a real engineered dam, a big concrete structure—had failed. The Johnstown flood had caused a serious dam failure but it was an earth dam and it had not been designed or built by engineers. It had just been put up to hold some water by amateurs, and when it went out the loss of life and property was tremendous, but it wasn’t any reflection on the engineering profession. The St. Francis dam was. A great chunk of concrete failed and the whole thing went out. There were several hundred people drowned. Bowers, our West Coast editor in San Francisco, did the same thing that Schmitt did on the Quebec Bridge. He went down there immediately and wrote a story as to what the causes of the failure were. He put them in the foundation, not in the structure of the concrete, or anything else. There again he was right, and the findings upheld him which was a publishing feather in our cap. Those are two of the most famous failures that we have ever had, and the two editors who wrote stories on them immediately had them corroborated when the investigation reports were issued.
During the war, of course, we did travel very extensively. The whole staff did. Nobody on the staff of Engineering News-Record had ever travelled outside the United States except to Canada and the Panama Canal. However, because there were so many of our readers overseas in one place or another, we decided that that was the thing to do. We sent people to Japan, Alaska, the Pacific Islands, and Europe. We attempted to cover all the war fronts as well as South America where there was a good deal of buildup, looking for strategic materials out in the wilds. Everyone who was engaged in any of those trips had some exciting experiences—interesting experiences, at least.
I think the toughest time I had was in 1943. I was in England looking at the airbases that we were building, and I wanted to go to North Africa where the Sicily invasion was about to take place. I was having a very hard time getting down there because there were so many other correspondents already on the scene. That trip eventually began in Scotland and went down to Marrakech and across North Africa into Egypt and Palestine and over to Iran, and much of the travel, of course, on that trip was exciting and difficult. From Scotland to Marrakech was a flight of fourteen hours which was a long flight in those days. It’s still reasonably long. I smoked then, as I do now, and you couldn’t smoke. This plane was just a flying gas tank. It was a B-24, but not only was there gasoline in its wings and in its tanks, but there were tanks of gasoline in the fuselage. You were just sitting in a little corridor between gasoline so that nobody was smoking. I don’t know but that’s the hardest thing I ever did. By the time I got to Marrakech I was nuts, and I quit smoking. I thought, “If that’s the way it is, let’s don’t do it anymore.” I started again later, but I was off that habit for three years. I don’t know but that’s the worst experience I ever had during the war, not smoking for fourteen hours, and not sleeping either.
Burlingame: Those planes were terrible!
Bowman: Yes. Trying to find a place to sleep I finally went back toward the door where there was a great pile of rubber boats, lashed down. They looked like a pile of canvas tarpaulins. I leaned against it for a while. I finally sat up on it and then lay down. That was fine until the pilot came back. I don’t know how long I’d been there, not very long, I guess, but he ate me up. Of course it was proper. I might have dug a hole in one of them, or something, but I was really sleepy and worn out. They were supposed to be useful if we needed them.
Then from Marrakech on up to Algiers I finally got a ride in a DC-3. There was a captain, a sergeant and one other man. That’s all that was aboard. I was talking to this young captain. He was crying because he’d been in the army for a year and a half, and they taught him how to fly fighter planes. He said that he was a good fighter plane pilot, and they’d sent him down to fly this DC-3. This was only the second time that he’d flown a DC-3, and he flew it like a fighter plane. We had an exciting trip, exciting to me, but he perhaps didn’t think it was so exciting.
Then you’d sit around these airports hoping to get out. You’d go out every day, “No, you aren’t on this plane.” You’d go back to town. I was reminded of this not long ago because I was talking to the general who was in command of a unit in Persia at the time I was over there. He was then just a colonel. We got into Basra on the Persian Gulf, and I was writing a story on the development of this harbor over there for our ships which came there bringing these supplies for Russia through the back door. I was also writing a story on the railway and the highway that was being built up to Teheran. I got all this story about the port and everything finished. I was ready to go. Day after day I couldn’t get on a ship to go North. Well, it was a hundred and thirty-five temperature with a humidity of about eighty-five, and all you could do was lie down. You couldn’t go any place, it was so hot! Day after day. It was a little like the boys in Bougainville out in the Pacific, complete deadliness. The thing that I remember most about it was that you’d lie there as long as you could in the heat. Then you’d get up and get a bucket of water and throw it in the bed, just make it completely wet, then dive into this wetness and lie there awhile until you cooled off. Or you’d take a sheet, wrap it around you and then walk through the shower bath and then lie down. It was a hard way to get a story, but very, very interesting.
Phillips: One little problem occurs to me doesn’t have anything to do with travels, but as an editor, how do you confront the current competition for reading time?
Bowman: That’s very important, and it is something that we’re quite cognizant of because it had something to do with our change of concept. We thought of ourselves in the early days as being a competitor of the specialist magazines in the water works and highway field and so on and they were competitors, at least for certain types of our readers and our advertisers. The regional publications were also a part of the competition. With this new concept, they aren’t considered our real competition anymore. The competition is television, the general magazines and recreation, new opportunities for people to travel longer vacations. Actually you were competing for one hour of the man’s time, and we felt that we had the makings of a good case for ourselves in this publishing of more information they needed. It would save them time looking at five or six magazines if we could be successful in having all the information in our book he needed to make his decisions.
The big feature articles we used to publish were long, detailed and descriptive. Those have been cut down very greatly to what we consider to be the real essential must. It was no longer a case of describing a water works by what was new in it, what was significant about it. That approach cuts down reading time. Then there are the round-up stories. Instead of publishing seven articles about seven dams that are underway in the United States by the Bureau of Reclamation, we publish one article covering the significance of all seven dams. You cut down the length of the story and give the reader the real meat of the thing. Of course, in every story that we publish we try to keep it a lot briefer than we ever did. We’ve tried to learn to be better writers, read all of these books on short words and short sentences, and try to take advantage of them. I think that all of us pay a good deal more attention to the structure of our stories than we used to. We’re more consciously writing craftsmen now than we used to be. We used to be engineers who knew the English language enough to describe what we saw. There were very few journalists among us, you see, journalists in the sense of being educated journalists so far as the theory of writing is concerned. Any of us who had any of this dug it up ourselves. I think that all of us are much more conscious of the fact that we’re just not engineers who are writing. We are supposed to be craftsmen in the use of words so as to conserve people’s time, making the magazine as useful to as many people as we can and conserving their time in any way that we can in presenting the information. That’s about all you can do in competing with these other diversions, or necessities that people have. It’s tough because every other medium of communication has the same problem and they are getting better all the time in solving it.
We have some basic advantage on Engineering News-Record. I think McGraw-Hill has an advantage, too, because we in a sense are raw material and our product has something to do with the necessity of reading, being business papers. At least they are angled toward information a man needs to have. He doesn’t have to read a novel, or listen to radio, or look at television. He does have to read our kind of magazine or the same information place, or he’s soon out of business. But that isn’t enough of an advantage to let you rest on your ears, and say, “Well, he’s going to read it anyway.” That’s what we used to do, and fortunately he did read it. It didn’t make any difference whether it was long, or short, or what it was. The readers read the book. They had time to do it. They don’t have it now.
Phillips: That’s all I have unless Mr. Burlingame has some thoughts to put to you.
Burlingame: No, that’s all I can think of.
Phillips: Well, I want to thank you for coming down.
Bowman: Well, I suppose a second go around on a thing of this sort would be better. If I could go home and sleep on this thing, I could come back in a week and do better, give you more of what would be useful, but I wasn’t quite certain what it was you wanted.
Phillips: You’ve been very helpful to me.
Burlingame: It was exactly what I wanted. I’m trying always to get out into the field with information, trying to get out of the “big green building.”
Phillips: You’ll get a chance to see this again.
Bowman: Here’s the history of Engineering News-Record.
Burlingame: I’ve seen that.
Bowman: We did this about two years ago. It had never been done before, strangely enough, and we thought our 75th anniversary was a good time to do it.
Burlingame: Nobody has paid any attention to the history. One of the great difficulties that I’ve had in writing industrial history is that people didn’t have any idea about what had happened, how their corporation started. In the beginning records were lost. They had all been thrown away. I had a hell of a time. But here there’s a wonderful lot of stuff when compared with other corporations.
Bowman: You have a few individuals, too, who are pretty good at remembering.
Burlingame: Well, these oral reminiscences really are a great thing.
Bowman: Chevalier can remember a good deal. [Willard Chevalier was the publisher of ENR from 1927 to 1937.] Have you talked with Ed Nerhen yet?
Burlingame: I spent a day with Mr. Lord, and that was one of the most exciting days I ever had. When he started out I saw this brusque, brisk alert fellow, younger than I, I thought. He started out by saying “I am ninety.”
Bowman: He’s amazing.
Burlingame: He sure is.
Phillips: You shouldn’t feel too badly about this this morning. I am reminded of a remark that Justice Jackson made. He used to argue cases before the Supreme Court as Solicitor General. He said that he had three arguments, one he had planned to make, the argument that he actually made and the winning argument he made late that night when he crawled into bed.
Bowman: I heard a statement the other day. A fellow said, “What do you think about this?” The reply was, “I’m not certain. I haven’t heard myself talk on it yet.”
