A N'Yawk Childhood

After fifteen or so minutes of flipping through the huge New Yorker volume, I came across an interesting article in the November 26^th, 1932 issue. In between articles dealing with the possibilities of suicide and feminine luxuries found on 5^th Avenue (not to mention the loads of advertisements) was a short piece on a childhood transition. Right from the beginning, I could tell the author was trying to go for a personal approach. With a title like A N’Yawk Childhood, I feel like the author was trying to make his readers, most likely New Yorkers, think back to the days of their childhood, growing up on the streets of the Big Apple. In the article, author Joel Sayre describes the way he and his friends used to play “mobsters” in the streets, constantly saying that murder and assassinations were about to take place. To be perfectly honest, I had to read the article two or three times to even understand that the mobsters were just imaginary. That was the first major difference I noticed between 1930’s journalism and contemporary journalism: the stories were much more like stories, rather than features aimed at a mass audience. Just flipping through the rest of the magazine I could tell that the pieces were aimed more at an upper class, higher educated group of people as opposed to everyone like today’s magazines aim to target. As the story went on, the author described his lackadaisical lifestyle, playing with the other neighborhood children in the morning and retiring to the local drugstore in the afternoon. However, his life changes drastically when his parents take him out of public school and put him in a prep school at the age of nine. His new friends, all already versed in psychologist philosophies such as Jung, Adler, and Freud, teased him constantly about his upbringings. The story abruptly ends when he explains he learned these new kids didn’t know cards, and used that to his advantage to win money and respect. All in all, I thought the article was a great example of a coming-of-age story.

This volume of The New Yorker issues was extremely interesting to look through, mainly because magazines were so different 80 years ago compared to today. First of all, the issue I read only cost 15 cents, nothing compared to the $5 price tag on an issue today. The actual articles are much more prim and proper, having long, thought-out essays with literary qualities rather than the short and sweet journalistic articles we are used to these days. Lastly, I thought the advertisements were really interesting to look at. We are used to catchy color photos with few words for our ads, but these ones were wordy, descriptive, and had one basic, hand drawn picture. Overall, I thought it was really cool to go back and look at a magazine from the 1930’s.