Doogie Howser - You Are NOT the Father!

I will be the first to admit that I am lacking when it comes to tackling the great books of the world. I’m a periodicals guy. At present I subscribe to nine magazines (excluding bar journals and trade publications) and that figure is down from eleven (thanks to the closure of two magazines mid-subscription). I also get the Sunday New York Times (which, come to think of it contains a tenth magazine). My habit got started in earnest when I was in law school. Magazines provided a concentrated dose of leisure reading in increments I could wedge between tedious sessions of defiling casebooks with multiple shades of highlighter. And in the beginning, there was Esquire.

I started reading Esquire during the summer of 1988, between my sophomore and junior year in college. As I was approaching the age of 21 I made a decision that I needed to refine my act a bit. I spent that summer working as, for lack of a better term, an errand-runner at the Missouri Supreme Court. I was associating with the justices, their clerks, support staff, and other individuals whose interests I assumed would not mesh well with those of a 20 year old fraternity guy. Esquire provided a portal into the world beyond campus life. I became a subscriber the following spring and have been one ever since. My wife will readily attest to the fact that I have never discarded a copy. I have over 21 years of Esquire back issues in my basement, not to mention the vintage issues I have recently taken to collecting, including my prized Volume I, Issue I.

The beginning of my relationship with Esquire coincided with the end of the magazine’s relationship with its editor-in-chief Lee Eisenberg. Near the end of 1990, Hearst Publications reassigned Eisenberg to London for the launch of Esquire U.K. (a publication whose U.S. subscription rates are ridiculously expensive but which I do occasionally purchase OTC). During the waning months of Eisenberg’s tenure at the editorial helm, he had introduced a closing piece penned by Bruce McCall. It was called “A Letter at Last” and was intended to be a letter to Eisenberg from the famed New Yorker artist. Without digging through my basement archives to verify, I believe the series ran six or seven months. The letters were quasi-stream-of-consciousness observations, if not lamentations, on a variety of relatively mundane subjects. It was, if you will, a slightly more literate Seinfeld monologue. It is also the template for, if not the outright progenitor of this blog.

Yes, I am fully aware that Doogie Howser is oft-credited with being the father of the blog. I disagree. Using a computer to register one’s observations is only a piece of the equation. Let’s not forget that young Dr. Howser was maintaining a diary. His journal was never intended to be a public document, at least not one intended for contemporaneous public consumption. On the other hand, McCall’s observations, while addressed to one, were intended for all and were intended to be read at or near the time when they were recorded. I submit that Bruce McCall is the grandfather of the blog and Lee Eisenberg his muse. I salute both of these gentlemen and offer my most profound thanks for the inspiration. I hope to do you both proud.

This should be my final "introductory" piece. I've been working in earnest on scraping random thoughts from the nooks and crannies of my gray matter into my trusty pocket Moleskine and hope to move things from there into this space very soon.