Alan Halpern RIP

Alan Halpern, magazine editor

December 15, 2005|By Gayle Ronan Sims

INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

http://articles.philly.com/2005-12-15/news/25422978_1_city-magazines-magazine-editor-larry-platt

Alan Halpern, 79, of Society Hill, editor of Philadelphia Magazine from 1951 to 1980, died of renal failure Tuesday at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.

Described in a 1988 Inquirer story as "shy and soft-spoken, a cigarette addict who seemed to hide in a cloud of smoke," Mr. Halpern suffered from heart disease the last several years.

When Mr. Halpern - newly returned from Paris, where he had worked for a picture magazine while attending the Sorbonne - joined the magazine, he was the only one in the office. He did the writing, editing, makeup and design. The magazine featured little more than puff pieces on Philadelphia businesses.

Philadelphia Magazine began to change with the ascent of D. Herbert Lipson as publisher in 1961. Under Lipson, who now owns the magazine, Mr. Halpern made Philadelphia something of a local sensation. It began publishing in-depth investigative stories in a free-wheeling style Mr. Halpern encouraged.

"He was a very quiet leader. Alan was inspirational . . . he cultivated writers," Philadelphia editor Larry Platt said yesterday. "He was not a field general."

In the 1970s, Mr. Halpern took the magazine in a different direction. It catered to affluent, status-conscious readers and began to list the city's "best" and "worst." The approach worked. By 1978, circulation had doubled to 137,000, and other city magazines copied Halpern's style.

The relationship between Lipson and Mr. Halpern, despite their successes over the years, was strained.

"He threatened to quit on a regular basis. Then he would come back in a couple of hours," Lipson said yesterday. "He would bring in a list of story ideas, and I couldn't wait to see them in print. He had a different perspective. He was brilliant."

Mr. Halpern quit in earnest in 1980. Afterward, he consulted for a number of magazines, including Atlantic City.

A 1943 graduate of West Philadelphia High School, Mr. Halpern spent a year in the Merchant Marine before earning a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Pennsylvania in 1947. He lived in Paris for a couple of years before returning to Philadelphia in 1950 and married Sara Bomberger.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Halpern is survived by a brother, Edward.

A memorial service is being planned. Burial is private.

Contact staff writer Gayle Ronan Sims at 215-854-4185 or gsims@phillynews.com.

Broad Street Review http://www.broadstreetreview.com/main/article/Alan_Halpern_Stealth_revolutionary

Alan Halpern: Stealth revolutionary

Alan Halpern: Stealth revolutionary

BY: Dan Rottenberg 2006

Alan Halpern, editor of Philadelphia Magazine from 1951 to 1980 and father of the modern city magazine, died December 13th at age 79.

In the age of TV, he galvanized the printed word. 

DAN ROTTENBERG

When Alan Halpern became editor of Philadelphia Magazine in 1951, magazines were largely a national phenomenon. It was the heyday of Life, Look and the Saturday Evening Post. City magazines and local alternative weeklies as we know them today didn’t exist. 

Philadelphia itself was a bland Chamber of Commerce giveaway that engaged in some of journalism’s most corrupt practices, like selling adulatory cover stories to any Chamber member willing to pay the going price. To be sure, America’s cities then enjoyed robust competition among local daily newspapers. But in most of these places— including Philadelphia— the papers avoided disturbing the local status quo or each other, preferring to practice the Gentleman’s Code of the journalism profession, i.e., “Don’t you tell on me, and I won’t tell on you.”

      Amid this intellectual torpor, Halpern seemed an unlikely revolutionary. He was a shy introvert who once described himself as “a hermit progressing to a recluse.” Like another famous introverted editor— William Shawn of the New Yorker— Halpern shrank from direct engagement with the world and so relied instead on his writers to feed his curiosity.

In the process, Halpern invented the modern urban monthly magazine — stylish, sophisticated and abrasively irreverent toward the local establishment — and consequently changed the face of American journalism.

During Halpern’s 29 years as editor, Philadelphia evolved from a Chamber of Commerce puff sheet with no editorial budget and just 6,000 readers to an innovator in investigative reporting and finally to a fat and trendy merchandising tool with 142,000 paid circulation by the time he left in 1980.

     Long before I knew Halpern personally— and long before I moved to Philadelphia and went to work for him— I knew him through his pioneering magazine. In the late ’60s and early ’70s I was a reporter and editor in Chicago— a heady time and place for a journalist, what with Mayor Richard J. Daley, Hugh Hefner, the police riot at the ’68

Democratic convention, the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial and the police murder of sleeping Black Panthers. Yet my inspiration in those days came not from Chicagoans but from the monthly arrival of Philadelphia magazine in my mail. Those were the days when Philadelphia’s Gaeton Fonzi stood up to such local powers as Walter Annenberg and the Inquirer’s extortionist reporter Harry Karafin, when Greg Walter exposed graft and child abuse at the Pearl Buck Foundation, when Nancy Love delved into previously taboo subjects like swinger parties, when Charles McNamara and Bernard McCormick poked their inquisitive noses into all sorts of corners — from education to transportation— and brought esoteric subjects to life with the sort of wry sophistication later cornered by the New Yorker’s John McPhee.

     Operating in an uptight, stodgy and self-deprecating city, Philadelphia’s writers brought style and wit to every subject, no matter how mundane. But the real difference between Philadelphia and other publications in those days was the difference between a movie and a lecture. Instead of reporting the dry facts about suburban burglaries and urban prostitution, Philadelphia’s writers portrayed the night’s work of a fictitious “composite” burglar and prostitute, based on real people. They wrote not as objective journalists but as passionate humans sharing their excitement about their subjects. They even inserted themselves into their stories. In Fonzi’s dissection of Annenberg, flashbacks recounting the mighty publisher’s abuses of his power were interspersed with flash-forward scenes describing Fonzi’s own attempts to interview Annenberg; such was the tension generated by this device that the reader damn near jumped out of his skin in anticipation of the ultimate confrontation between the reporter and his quarry.

     At that time, you bought Philadelphia magazine not to read specific stories (which were rarely spotlighted on the cover) or writers (who weren’t even listed in the table of contents), but for the general expectation that anything you read in any issue would surprise, delight, shock or fascinate you. In this manner Philadelphia introduced its readers to a broad range of important subjects that wouldn’t otherwise have interested them— which is perhaps a journalist’s most important task. An informed public may be the foundation of a healthy society, but information is like medicine: It does no good unless people swallow it. People didn’t merely swallow Philadelphia; they gobbled it up voraciously.

     The magazine’s appeal, incidentally, lay almost entirely in its words. Aside from a few illustrations thrown in as an afterthought, Philadelphia offered no design, no color, no glitzy layouts and picture spreads, really nothing to please the eye until the mid-’70s at the earliest. Philadelphia then was a testament to the sheer delight of the written word.

     In time, of course, Philadelphia’s techniques were copied and even improved by other city magazines (most notably New York and Texas Monthly) and then appropriated by newspapers (especially in their so-called “style” and “magazine” sections). In time, Halpern’s original writers drifted off to other careers, to be replaced by new generations of Halpern protégés. In time, Halpern and his publisher, Herb Lipson— like many another editor-publisher team— came to resent each other as each grew embittered by the other’s failure to appreciate his contribution to the magazine’s success. And in time Halpern left Philadelphia and launched a new mentoring career as a consultant to such new magazine ventures as Manhattan inc., Avenue, Philly Sport, Applause and Seven Arts.

     Halpern got into magazine journalism at just the time when most Americans were abandoning newspapers for television as their primary means of connecting with the world. Magazines were perceived then as the fun-and-games corner of the journalism

business, certainly less essential than either newspapers or TV. But the trouble with TV is, you don’t have to think in order to watch it. By contrast, even a tabloid newspaper or a pornographic novel requires you to exercise your mind by converting abstract symbols— letters— into words and sentences. Two generations of American TV-watchers were largely spared this level of mental training, which may explain the widespread inability of Americans under 50 to think analytically about civic or global issues.

      The solution was to rekindle a hunger for reading— the same kind of hunger that Philadelphia magazine first kindled in readers like me back in the ’60s. For nearly half a century, while most Americans were succumbing to the siren song of TV, Alan Halpern was galvanizing readers of the printed word and teaching other writers and editors to do the same.

     Halpern died on December 13th at the age of 79, just as television was at last being displaced by the Internet as Americans’ first line of connection to the world. Rarely has the timing of an individual’s career coincided so closely with the world’s need for his services. 

Alan Halpern

http://www.phillymag.com/articles/in-memoriam-alan-halpern/

On December 13th, Alan Halpern, editor of Philly Mag from 1951 through 1980, passed away. He made this magazine America’s most honored regional publication and, along the way, created the city magazine genre. The author, a Halpern protégé and currently a correspondent for GQ magazine, remembers the man and his vision.

He was my mentor. And my tormentor.

And those were just two of the reasons why I loved Alan Halpern, why we all loved Alan Halpern, even when we wanted to strangle him. Like a great many others, I owe my career to the man. Because he never let me forget how good I was. Or how bad I was. That was Alan’s gift.

“Dear Lisa,” he wrote in a recent e-mail. “I saw you on TV. What crap.” Then two weeks later: “Happy Thanksgiving!” with a cheesy Jacquie Lawson e-mail card and a dancing turkey.

I was 21 years old when I first entered the Alan Halpern orbit, joining a cult of writers who considered him their guru. It was a privileged and bizarro group, consisting of terribly talented (and fucked-up) writers all over the land who had one thing in common: Alan’s acceptance. There are dozens of us, some successful, some not, some dead, some who just seem to be. Alan didn’t care. He didn’t care if you hung a bamboo swag lamp in your office and slept there at night (you know who you are), or if you had sex with each other on the office sofa. As long as you had “nifty ideas” and cared about this crazy world of magazine journalism as much as he did. If he liked something you wrote, you’d get a “terrific!” in the margin. If he liked it a lot, two terrifics. And if he loved it, “Terrific! Terrific! Terrific!”

I lived for three terrifics from Alan Halpern.

He taught me all the important things: That the only person I was writing for was the reader. Not my editors (not even him!), not my friends, and not the subject, either. That it was okay to fall in love (metaphorically, of course) with my subject, as long as I divorced him at the typewriter. And that you should never have lunch without a cocktail.

Alan used to say (long before anyone else did), “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.” The journalism police didn’t like that very much. But Alan was correct. In his brilliant, iconoclastic way, nothing was more important than the telling of the story.

His was one that should have been told a hundred times, and in regions far beyond Broad Street. Alan invented city magazines, but never got the credit. He put up with our demanding chairman, Herb Lipson, for years — decades! — and lived to tell the tale.

Actually, deep down, I believe Alan always secretly loved Herb; like all great love affairs, it was terribly complicated. He never did get over the fact that he created this magazine, but was forever banished from the kingdom after 30 years. Two months before his death, Elliott Curson, his lifelong pal the ad guy, sent a breaking-news e-mail out. Alan and Herb, photographed together, having a make-up lunch at the Palm. It only took them 25 years.

He nurtured me and tortured me, too, since that day, 23 years ago, when I went to work for $50 a week at Atlantic City magazine, for one reason only: I had heard he was “consulting” on this goofy little magazine, and I was determined to work for the Legendary Alan Halpern. My first day on the job, he instructed me to “go walk up and down the beach and interview the lifeguards.” Great work if you can get it. He ended up running the results of my hard labor as a cover story on “the Myth of the Atlantic City Lifeguard.” Alan saw a story in everything. And, for better or worse, he made me look at life the same way.

Originally published in Philadelphia Magazine, January 2006

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/philly/obituary.aspx?n=charles-macnamara-chuck&pid=155517676 - fbLoggedOut

MacNAMARA

CHARLES "CHUCK" Before Google there was Chuck MacNamara. MacNamara, one of the editors who helped pioneer the city magazine concept at Philadelphia Magazine, died Jan. 6, 2012 from heart failure at Morrisville Presbyterian Apartments in Morrisville, Pa.

He was known for his extra-ordinary range of knowledge and memory for detail. A 1957 cum laude University of Pennsylvania graduate, he joined Philadelphia Magazine in 1959, and was legendary editor Alan Halpern's right hand man as the magazine grew from an obscure business magazine called Greater Philadelphia Magazine to a publication which won national acclaim in the 1960s. MacNamara wrote entertainingly about often obscure or historic subjects, complementing the work of investigative reporters such as Gaeton Fonzi and Greg Walter.

It was MacNamara who introduced his Penn classmate Fonzi to the magazine. He helped invent sections such as "Top Docs" and "Best and Worst" which have since been imitated by hundreds of local magazines. MacNamara was a shareholder in Gold Coast Magazine in Fort Lauderdale, Fl. in 1970 when it was bought by his former Philadelphia Magazine colleague Bernard McCormick. After leaving Philadelphia Magazine in the 1970s he wrote numerous articles over the years for Gold Coast and other Florida publications owned by the same company. His most recent piece was in the January issue of Gold Coast. He also wrote an introduction to a soon-to-be-published book on the birth of city magazines in Philadelphia. MacNamara was born in Phila., and lived in Birmingham, Ala. before his family returned to the Lansdowne area. After suffering polio as a teenager, he wore a leg brace for the rest of his life and was confined to a wheel chair in recent years. He is survived by sisters Barbara Lucash of Morrisville and Judith Anderson of Drexel Hill: 3 nephews and a niece and 2 great nieces and a great nephew.

Chuck MacNamara wrote for Gold Coast magazine for 40 years. His most recent piece, ironically, was a reflection on the life of former Florida Gov. Claude Kirk, who died in September. Chuck followed him last week. The attached obit from today’s Philadelphia Inquirer mentions that he was lame from polio, a word we rarely hear these days. It happened when Chuck was 16 and a budding track star. He dragged an inert leg around for the last 61 years. Eventually it put him a wheelchair. That handicap did not stop him from working, first at Philadelphia Magazine, and for the last 35 years as a freelancer, often for our Florida magazines.

He was an editor’s dream. His copy was almost always flawless, never an inaccurate statement, rarely even a typo. You could call him on short notice, as we did with the Claude Kirk piece, and ask if he had anything for our Undercurrent section. Days later we got the piece.

Chuck liked a drink. One day at lunch at Bookbinder's across from our office in Philadelphia, he was on his third martini. A companion said, “Chuck, do you realize every time you drink one of those see-thrus you kill 300,000 brain cells?” Chuck reflected briefly, then slowly raised his glass, and, sipping, replied, “I just hope my brain holds on as long as Winston Churchill’s.”

He did not quite make it. But he was close.

"MAC NAMARA

CHARLES ‘CHUCK’ Before Google there was Chuck MacNamara. MacNamara, one of the editors who helped pioneer the city magazine concept at Philadelphia Magazine, died Jan. 6, 2012 from heart failure at Morrisville Presbyterian Apartments in Morrisville, Pa.

He was known for his extra-ordinary range of knowledge and memory for detail. A 1957 cum laude University of Pennsylvania graduate, he joined Philadelphia Magazine in 1959, and was legendary editor Alan Halpern's right hand man as the magazine grew from an obscure business magazine called Greater Philadelphia Magazine to a publication which won national acclaim in the 1960s. MacNamara wrote entertainingly about often obscure or historic subjects, complementing the work of investigative reporters such as Gaeton Fonzi and Greg Walter. It was MacNamara who introduced his Penn classmate Fonzi to the magazine. He helped invent sections such as ‘Top Docs’ and ‘Best and Worst’ which have since been imitated by hundreds of local magazines.

MacNamara was a shareholder in Gold Coast magazine in Fort Lauderdale, Fl. in 1970 when it was bought by his former Philadelphia Magazine colleague Bernard McCormick.

After leaving Philadelphia Magazine in the 1970s he wrote numerous articles over the years for Gold Coast and other Florida publications owned by the same company. His most recent piece was in the January issue of Gold Coast. He also wrote an introduction to a soon-to-be-published book on the birth of city magazines in Philadelphia.

MacNamara was born in Phila., and lived in Birmingham, Ala. before his family returned to the Lansdowne area. After suffering polio as a teenager, he wore a leg brace for the rest of his life and was confined to a wheel chair in recent years. He is survived by sisters Barbara Lucash of Morrisville and Judith Anderson of Drexel Hill: 3 nephews and a niece and 2 great nieces and a great nephew."