6                                       Ogden Nash

very closely with Dan—he was my boss, but we were close in spite
of that—he was collecting every kind of English, French, and Ger¬
man illustrated photographic magazine—not at his desk at Double-
day's but in his toom in the boarding house on Stewart Avenue
in Garden City, which was littered with these magazines, scissors
and paste. He was cutting them up, putting them back together,
amending them, seeing what he would do with them if he had his
own way, and shortly after that he began having what I came to
learn were weekly conferences with Henry Luce. Dan was not
only an innovator but an extraordinary adapter. He was able to
take these magazines and see how they could be improved and how
to put them into the one thing he had in mind.

Now, I shall always believe that he put the idea into Henry
Luce's mind. From my own a,ssociation with him, I think the idea
was Dan's completely: that it was time for Luce and his organiza¬
tion to start the most comprehensive and interesting and infor¬
mative photographic magazine that there had yet been, using a
combination of photographs and text. Dan was an enormous be¬
liever in communication, and I knew at this time he believed that
the written word could be supplemented and illuminated by the
great progress in photography that had then taken place.

I am convinced—I may be wrong in this and perhaps Mary can
contradict me—that he went to Ti7Jie primarily not to work on that
magazine but to create the new one that appeared in November of
1938 as the first issue of Life.

I shall, if I may, devote the next few minutes to reminiscences of
my years with Dan, which may of necessity be somewhat senti¬
mental but I hope they will not be maudlin. They are ser down not
chronologically but as the kaleidoscope of memory shifts.

I was grateful to Dan first of all because in March of 1925 he
rescued me from rhe lowest stratum of a decaying empire, that of
Barron G. Collier, rhe king of streetcar advertising. I had been
working there for two years. I was told later that both Scott Fitz¬
gerald and John Held, Jr., had served a term there, too, but I did