His Own Man
After 40 years with the Magazine, 30 as Editor,Charlie Widmayer 30 retires with the July issue
Few editorial projects are best conceived in secret and pursued in stealth, but this one was. The reason is apparent at a glance: This Alumni Album is about the retiring - in both senses - editor of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, who would rather accept a hot coal without tongs than willingly assent to a story in his beloved magazine giving him his due. And so, with the ready connivance of writer, magazine staff, photographer, and printer, this article was prepared without his knowledge.
The immediate problem is that it is not so easy to give CHARLES EDWARD WIDMAYER '30 his due; for his due, in backwoods lingo, stretches from thar to thar. Graduating from Hanover amid the lowering gloom of the Depression, he went on to Harvard for a year's graduate study in English, then returned to Hanover to teach English for a year beginning in the deep Depression year of 1932. Is that all? By no means. He doubled in brass as the College's Director of Athletic Publicity, and was soon made Sports Editor of the Alumni Magazine and Director of the Dartmouth News Service - that last being a little chore he tossed off for 20 years, until 1953. But these and other varied duties served only as warm-ups for his final home as editor of the Alumni Magazine, a task that he took on in 1943 and has performed superbly for the last 30 years.
Thirty years means 300 issues - 300 times to wonder what ought to be said, to wonder how it could be said, to wonder how it would be taken by as mixed an audience as ever editor wrote for, to try to get the right people to say it, to regret that they were always somehow unavailable at your hour of most need, to wake with a start at night realizing that someone else could say it as well or better, to get the copy back (always a little late), to speculate why so competent a writer so often falls short, or so unassuming a fellow did so much better than you had dared hope, to wonder whether you were pushing your well-nigh nonexistent staff past the point of flesh-and-blood endurance, to be your own advertising manager and business manager and printing production manager, with the accusing calendar on the wall forever asking you how you can get done today what had to be finished yesterday, before you can face what positively must be done today and tomorrow.
And then to stare wonderingly at the finished issue when it was finally put in your hands, looking so trim and well-chiseled and neat despite the chaos from whence it sprang that it almost seemed like a strange product that you had never seen before.
Charlie Widmayer's ability to go through these birth pangs so many times, and produce such creditable offspring, is indicative of a deeper truth: that he has solved, within his area of stewardship, what is possibly the most serious problem of modern man - how to be faithful to multiple sets of often apparently conflicting loyalties and obligations. In Charlie's case, the first obligation was unquestionably that toward Dartmouth College. The College was the Alumni Magazine's reason to exist: the Magazine's purpose was to retain the loyalty and support of those who had left Hanover by mirroring and interpreting Hanover to them, and thereby act as a communications link among all the Dartmouth constituencies.
But the Magazine could not be a house organ: To be good, a publication must be free; and Charlie's primary and uppermost concern has always been to prevent the Magazine from being used by anyone in any way or for any purpose that would compromise its editorial integrity. And what means editorial integrity? In this case, it meant simply his ability to decide, on purely journalistic grounds, what should or should not be put into the Magazine. The only time writer of this article has ever seen Charlie Widmayer genuinely and visibly alarmed was over a rumor that the staff of the Magazine was to be raided to produce a money-raising, promotional publication for the College.
How he achieved this was often a brilliant exercise in the art of avoidism. Though born in Washington, D.C., Charlie has raised taciturnity to levels that would be admired on the upper reaches of the Ompompanoosuc and the Wild Ammonoosuc alike. Faced with a suggestion that he suspected he didn't like, 99 times out of 100 he could side-step it with one or another variant of the silent treatment.
If you think this meant he was against controversy, think again. Nothing pleased him better than a ripsnorting fight in the pages of the Alumni Magazine. In fact, he would promote such a fight at any opportunity - witness the Magazine's carriage not only of anti-war firebrand Jamie Newton's commencement address (which was to be expected), but also of the long interview with Newton in a subsequent issue. Charlie would take infinite pains to avoid seeming to stack the cards in the "Letters to the Editor" column when debate raged on some hot issue, but he was always secretly if not openly delighted at the debate itself. And advertising revenue quite aside (the Alumni Magazine has not lacked for advertising ever since the Upper Valley became a real estate pitchman's paradise), it never occurred to him not to accept an ad from some group that the College might greatly prefer would just go away.
As for the Magazine's physical layout, few movie queens have ever had so much attention paid to their appearance. It is easy for an editor to get comfortable with the look of a publication, and to persuade himself that his readers would prefer to keep it as it is. But the editor's job is to keep ahead of the reader, to aim for where the reader will probably be a year or two hence. So the AlumniMagazine has gone through several complete redesigns under Widmayer, with smaller changes and experiments going on constantly.
This plough-and-stars approach, keeping one eye ever on the big job (which is to be free) and the other on the details, has made the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, year in and year out, the best of its kind in the country, so it is not surprising that Charlie has the medals to prove it. Columbia University alumni have honored him for his service to education. He received the first Distinguished Service Award from Editorial Projects for Education. He was the first double winner of the Robert Sibley Award for the best American alumni magazine and has carried off uncounted honors for special categories. (More wins would have brought "Break-up-the-Yankees" grumbles from other editors.)
Because he also believes that his job includes broadening the horizons of his readers, in 1957 he was a moving force in founding, together with a number of other college editors, Editorial Projects for Education. Their first productions were the so-called Moonshooter inserts, special articles on topics broader than an alumni magazine would normally tackle. These inserts appeared from time to time in the Dartmouth and other major college alumni magazines. Charlie was president of EPE and chairman of its board of trustees from 1967 to 1970. EPE is now the Publisher of the newspaper Chronicle of Higher Education.
The Moonshooter insert may now be a thing of the past — the individual alumni magazines are broadening their scope at a fast clip — but its spiritual descendant is to be seen in the March Alumni Magazine, entitled "Undergraduate Journal." This 16-page insert, a sampling of student-created, student-selected essays, stories, photographs and other works done in regular courses, is intended to give the alumni some inkling of "what the College is contributing to them [the students] and what they in turn are contributing to the academic quality of the College."
Looking back on 30 years and 300 issues of the AlumniMagazine, for what should Charlie Widmayer be honored? First of all, perhaps, for endurance (and don't knock it). But still more laudable is the ability to keep the Magazine enduringly independent during all that time, feeling the pressures from all its constituent audiences while surrendering to none of them, reflecting the College and its changes faithfully without being its spokesman-slave.
No one but another editor will ever know how hard that is. But this piece is being written by another editor, who can dedicate this fragment of Kipling to Charlie in the confidence that he will understand:
"I have told the tale of our lives For a sheltered people's mirth In jesting guise; But ye are wise, Ye will know what the jest is worth."
MR. SAUNDERS is Executive Editor of Forbes magazine, a past President of the Alumni Council, and a former member of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine's Advisory Board.
