An intimate, unvarnished look at the making of the Sunday sections of The New York Times in their pre-internet heyday, back when they shaped the country's political and cultural conversation. Over 30 years, Robert Stock edited seven of those sections, innovating and troublemaking all the way - getting the paper sued for $1 million, locking horns with legendary editors Abe Rosenthal and Max Frankel, and publishing articles that sent the publisher Punch Sulzberger up the wall.
On one level, his memoir tracks Stock's amazing career from his elevator job at Bonwit Teller to his accidental entry into journalism to his public relations tours deep inside the aviation and oil industries to his Times years, which included the creation of a pioneering column about issues affecting the elderly.
On another level, this is a book built on stories and anecdotes, comical and deadly serious. Rod Laver challenged Stock to a tennis match. He played a clarinet duet with superstar Richard Stoltzman. A Hopi tribal chairman and a Greek archaeologist introduced him to their lost worlds. He shared a sail with music mogul Ahmet Ertegun, a Mafia-spiced brunch with Jerry Orbach, and an embarrassing moment with Jacqueline Kennedy.
From Stock's early days as an air raid bicycle messenger in Bridgeport CT... to his seat at the captain's table on the SS France...to his belated sowing of wild oats at age 45...to his stopping the presses at The New York Times...his book offers a fresh perspective on a not-that-long-ago era and industry that were, in so many ways, very different from the now.
Me and The Times should find favor among readers who enjoyed Carl Bernstein's Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom, and Adam Nagourney's The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism.