Gude Friday

I’m sitting on my commuter train zooming into New York City from Norwalk, Ct. at a good 70 mph clip. This is a big day for the Gude family. It’s my wife’s last day at her job (she was the popular executive director of an education foundation here in town … TWO mayors attended her going-away party this week), my two sons’ last day of school (6th and 9th grades) and my last day at Newsweek after ten years.

I’m calling today Gude Friday.

Ten years is nearly 500 issues of the magazine and except for some big news stories, they’re all a blur. Sometimes, as I’d look at the few hundred cover images on the cover department’s walls, I’d think about how each issue felt like a bloody crisis to produce at the time with ideas that wouldn’t materialize in my stressed-out brain, little sleep, impossible deadlines, uncooperative sources, tricky technology and finicky editors. But I’d find myself trying to remember what I had done in any of them. They dissipate like smoke in my memory bank as each week passes by; just not enough room there.

I had my Newsweek going-away party on Tuesday. I was worried to death about it, too, and for good reason. Practically no one works on Tuesdays and I figured no one would come in to work just to go to a party.

There’s a precedent for my fears.

I had another going-away party when I left UPI in 1986 after seven years. I had worked at their World Headquarters in New York (in the super-cool Daily News building on 42nd Street (with the massive globe in the lobby) and where they filmed the early Superman movies with Christopher Reeve) back when the wire service had hundreds of client newspapers and when most of them carried both UPI and AP.

But we were still pretty broke, so UPI was sold by Scripts-Howard to a couple of well-meaning but green Baha’i guys for a buck and they moved the entire operation down to D.C. nearer to where they lived with their families. A lot of the New Yorkers stayed behind and got new jobs. Richard Curtis offered me a job as the graphics director of USA Today, but UPI convinced me to stay (what was I thinking???). If I had defected, that would have meant no graphics department at all would have made the move. My small staff had quit, too, including Linda Eckstein, who, who left for Fortune magazine and wound up staying for 25 years, many of them as their graphics director.
After a year in Washington, D.C., working in their brand-new facilities at 14th and I Streets (across from Jello wrestling, but just a few blocks from the Whites House) I realized that I missed New York City. Living in DC was like living in a museum. Living in NYC was like living in a nightclub. Besides, my girlfriend was up there and I was getting sick of my Metroliner RR romance.

So, they threw me a going-away party….

The notice ticked out over the slow message wire (no email back then) and announced to the whole company that the local watering hole would be set up with weenies and chips, cash bar. I arrived at the appointed time and I discovered a loooooong table, enough for 20 people, cutting right down the center of the bar. I was the first to arrive. Damn.

So I sat and ordered a beer, looking down the runway of empty chairs with expectation and nerves.

And the wait began…

Finally, my good friend Iris Krasnow showed up (she was profiled in last week’s Time magazine for writing a book about women repairing their damaged relationships with their mothers. She’s also written a couple of best sellers: “Surrendering to Motherhood” about her four sons and Surrendering to Marriage” about her husband). What a relief it was to see her. Also, my non-UPI friend, Chuck, showed up a little later.

And that was it. No one else came.

(But, Chuck and Iris, who met that night, fell in love and got married. I was their best man. And Iris went on to write two best selling books about their kids and marriage)

So I was nervous about the Tuesday party at Newsweek. More to come about that in the next blog.

Also for me on this Gude Friday, it’s my final hour on this cell phone-infested prison car I’m sitting in. I’ve taken this train an hour each way, twice a day for 18 years. That’s about 9,000 hours. In the beginning my wife was thrilled about my commute. She saw the train as an opportunity for me to sit still, a place where I would be forced to have a little quiet time for reading, reflection and sleep. She thinks I’m destined for a heart attack because I don’t slow down very much, but I never once slept for fear of missing my station. I did read a ton of novels and a daily New York Times.

I have an issue with just sitting and doing nothing. It’s really boring. So when I wasn’t reading I drew like crazy. I doodled a lot (mostly eyeballs … go figure), illustrated two of my children’s books (they sold nearly 100,000 copies), sketched bunches of people around me in the act of being themselves (I sent some of the drawings into the Times and they ran a full page of them … a lot of their readers commute). I drew cartoons that I submitted to the New Yorker (they never ran one . . .) and the Times OpEd page (the only one they ever ran was the first one, on the conclave in Rome, but they ran it BIG) and I scribbled ideas for that week’s graphics for the magazine.

Commuting became an opportunity that I enjoyed quite a bit, because I could work undisturbed (until the cell phone arrived on the scene … don’t get me started….but I will say that I wasn’t bashful about getting them to quiet down… that changed the day the police came to escort me off the train…another story) Conclave at 450 pixels wide