ReadyMade: Instructions for everyday life

The 1970’s saw the popularity of many American icons reach their zenith, including but not limited to Richard Nixon, The Black Panthers, The Fonz, The Bee Gees, John McEnroe, Wonder Woman, The Shah of Iran, and The Bionic Man. One not so often talked about was recently called to my attention: Apartment Life magazine.

A few weeks ago, I got to have lunch with Tom Troland, a magazine veteran with a lot of stories to tell. Some of his best concerned Apartment Life, for which he worked for many years. I was reminded of our lunch last week when I read Katherine Sharpe’s post about how to make a DIY Hammock that she had fished from the online archive of Mother Earth News. Inspired, I dug out the photocopies of a few covers of Apartment Life Tom had given me. I was struck by the similarities between Apartment Life and ReadyMade, from the covers featuring fetching young couples (RM’s founders must have seen these, no?) to articles like “Projects to do right in your apartment” and the “Compleat Cyclist’s Compendium” (no, that’s not a typo, complete was once commonly spelled compleat but a nod to “The Compleat Angler” by Izaak Walton). So I dropped Tom a note to get the dirt on the long-gone magazine, a one-time editor, Charla Lawhon (who now serves as Managing Editor of InStyle, click here for a recent interview), the magazine’s transformation into Metropolitan Home and its eventual sale by Meredith to Hachette Filipacchi which stills publishes it under that name to this day. Tom Troland tells it like it is after the jump…

From: Andrew Wagner
Sent: Friday, August 28, 2009 12:36 PM
To: Thomas Troland
Subject: Hello!

Tom,

Hello there. I hope this finds you well. Thanks again so much for lunch a while back. It was great getting to talk to you and I really appreciate you taking the time. Would love to do it again before long and hopefully might have some interesting, relevant information to throw your way. We’ll see. Anyhow, I’m hoping to do a little blog post soon about Apartment Life and show the covers that you photocopied for me. I first just wanted to get a few things straight. When was Apartment Life started? How long did it run for? When did it morph into Met Home? When was it sold? And am I correct in remembering that many (if not all) of the Apartment Life archives were lost in the Des Moines floods in the early ’90s? What year was that exactly? Any other salient info about Apartment Life you’d care to share? Thanks so much Tom and hope to see you again soon…

All my best,

Andrew Wagner

On 8/28/09 3:17 PM, “Thomas Troland”  wrote:

Ten Things About Apartment Life (more or less):

1.      Apartment Life was launched as an ANNUAL (one-shot) in 1969 as APARTMENT IDEAS. It was a Better Homes & Gardens Special Interest Title in big page format (Life Magazine size).

2.      Renamed Apartment Life in 1973 as it became a Quarterly (The coaster covers I gave you are from that era.)

3.      Frequency increased to bi-monthly in 1976 (USA Bicentennial year) Apartment Life carried the slogan “Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” under the logo on the front cover for a couple of years. Harry Myers (who had headed Better Homes & Gardens promotion) became Publisher that year.

4.      AL went monthly in 1977. Circulation was 800,000.

5.      Dorothy Kalins was named Editor in Chief in 1978. She made the magazine ELEGANT. Put celebrities on the cover (Michael Douglas, Robin Williams and Jill Clayburgh are the ones I remember). Upscaled the content into a young adult’s guide to living well in big cities. Charla Lawhon (InStyle Managing Editor today) was an editor at AL in those days. A major annual feature in AL was “The New Classics,” an editorial showcase of the best new home “stuff”.  Food section was cast as “New American Cuisine” covering hot chefs and big city restaurants, which sparked a cookbook in the 1979-1980 time frame. Another favorite was “High-Low”, an edit feature that replicated a room furnished with very EXPENSIVE stuff as a matching room that cost $12.74 to do (not THAT low, I exaggerate).

6.      It worked pretty well. ADWEEK named AL one of the ten hottest magazines of 1979. Ad pages had increased 25% over 1978 levels. Revenues jumped 35%. (I take FULL responsibility for that. Me and about 45 other people, that is.)

7.      Decision was made—right around the time that I joined AL as Promotion Manager in July 1979—to move the magazine into a new position (Young Successful Homeowners in the US major markets) with a new name (We had several choices, but Metropolitan Home was the only one that was given serious consideration.) Both CEO Bob Burnett and General Manager Jim Autry were enthusiastic supporters of the transposition. I never enjoyed anything in publishing more than that time.

8.      AL was published until September 1980. We went on hiatus from that issue until the first issue of MH (Circulation 700,000) was published—April 1981. (I left Meredith and worked as Marketing Director of House Beautiful at Hearst from February 1982 thru October 1984 when I returned to Meredith as Marketing Director of BH&G Special Interest Publications from which I helped launch and build many of the magazines that Meredith publishes today.

9.      Met Home was published monthly from April 1981 through early 1992 when it was sold to Hachette.

10.  The year of the Flood in DSM was 1993. July 1993. The flood probably did destroy the AL archives. [A quick search of ebay reveals that a few copies can still be had however.]

I probably have some copies of late 1970s AL in the attic at home. I’ll see if I can retrieve them for you.

From: Andrew Wagner
Sent: Friday, August 28, 2009 3:35 PM
To: Thomas Troland
Cc: Britta Ware
Subject: Re: Hello!

Amazing Tom! Thank you so much. Do you mind if I use some of that in my post? Really fascinating and I think our readers would love some of this history. Please let me know if you have a problem with me including any of this information. Also, I would love to see some full issues of AL. Very cool. Hope you are well and hope to see you again soon!

All my best,

Andrew Wagner

On 8/28/09 3:36 PM, “Thomas Troland” wrote:

Sure. Just eliminate anything that feels snide.

From: Andrew Wagner
Sent: Friday, August 28, 2009 3:47 PM
To: Thomas Troland
Subject: Re: Hello!

Ha! Will do…thanks Tom. You are anything but snide…