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serving drinks, dinner, and then more drinks.

In those early years, was there a lot of drinking around the place?

Well, in the early years, with John Billings around, you minded your p's and q's. Because John Billings was a very well organized fellow who used very few words, was absolutely sure of what he was doing, was very well organized and didn't see any reason for having late nights, actually. He considered that anybody could put the magazine together and close it by 5 o'clock in the afternoon. He's the one and only managing editor I've ever known who took that attitude. All the others postponed decisions, run up overtime, the presses start late, the costs pile up--they all want to leave the choices open to the last minute.

So when you first joined, LIFE seemed like an “under control” operation.

Yes. Under John Billings, you had to be under control pretty well. He'd leave at 5 o'clock; there'd be checking to be done and so on, greens and all that. But that was left to somebody else.

Was the basic editorial structure what it was in later years, in 1937? In other words, were checkers doing certain things, and writers doing certain things, and editors doing certain things? Or