Our family pulled up stakes and moved the summer after my fifth grade. We had been in the house for ten years, the only home my siblings and I had known and the move was a bit of a . . . → Read More: Finding Tony Doughty]]> A slender kid with a deep voice, I hadn’t seen or heard from him in almost six decades

Our family pulled up stakes and moved the summer after my fifth grade. We had been in the house for ten years, the only home my siblings and I had known and the move was a bit of a jolt. Our parents sent my brother and me off to camp in northern Wisconsin for a month and then straight to our grandmother’s place in Oregon, Illinois, about a hundred miles west of Chicago. At the end of the summer we all piled into the car for the trip back to suburban Winnetka only to discover that we didn’t live there any more. That’s when we learned we now lived in Beloit, Wisconsin.

It was a bit of an adjustment, going from an upper-middle class suburb where we knew almost everyone to a small, lower-middle class blue-color industrial town on the Wisconsin/Illinois state line where we were complete strangers except for my mother’s parents and her sister’s family. We didn’t have a chance to say good-bye to our friends and our comic book collection and a number of our toys and various found objects kids accumulate all disappeared. To make things even more difficult, when we arrived we didn’t have a chance to scout out the new neighborhood, either: school started the next day.

Over the years I had always wondered what had happened to the kids who in the summer played baseball in the fields down at the end of Edgewood Lane, swam at Tower Road beach and in other months attended Hubbard Woods grade school, James Mann, principal. There were Dick McCurdy, Day Penfield, Billy Greeley, Dave McDonald, Bruce Beresford, Eddie Elmendorf, Chris Biddle, Donald Zelli and Tony Doughty, among others…and a whole raft of girls, most of whom I tried not to think about since I was regarded as the class jerk. In those days class jerks didn’t have girl friends.

Sometimes at night in recent years, waiting for the computer to finish backing up to an external drive, I would enter one or another of their names into Google hit “Search” and back would come thousands of listings, none of the few hundred I skimmed with a link to any of my friends. When I entered “Tony Doughty Illinois” I got 95,000 links. I tried to remember something unique about Tony that would help refine the search but 58 years tend to obscure the details of memory.

I did remember that he had a sense of humor but was not excitable or easily impressed, was slender with light brown hair, had deep voice and a loud laugh, lived on the east side of the Chicago and Northwestern tracks (the better part of town), named his dog Jeep, and had once admired the 1937 Packard limousine parked in my grandmother’s garage. Not much to go on, but worth a try. A pet named for a vehicle and raised eyebrows at an old black limo suggested pairing his name in a Google search with “automobile,” which returned 34,000 links, and “car” which returned 16,700 links. It was the third link down on the first page that caught my eye: “Car Rides With Tony Doughty.”

“Bingo!” I whispered. “Bingo, bingo, bingo!”

The link was to an assisted living facility in Walker, Minnesota and it was their monthly newsletter posted to their web site. There it was, in the May Creek Lodge calendar, “June 6th, Car Rides With Tony Doughty.” So far, so good: the logic was holding up. As kids we had gone to Camp Highlands in northern Wisconsin and Walker, Minnesota, was pretty close to the same environment as Rhinelander and Minocqua, Wisconsin…even to the name of the nearby lake, Leech Lake.

I decided to try one more Google search for Tony, this time with “antique automobile.” Up came an article written by a Tony Doughty for The Arrow Driver, published by the Midwest Region of the Pierce-Arrow Society. At the end of the article was a photo of a restored Pierce-Arrow Series 33 1922 touring car and a man sitting behind the wheel giving a “thumbs-up” sign. The chin and the grin looked familiar.

I flipped back to the May Creek Lodge web site and found the email address of the executive director, Ann Noland. I told her that I was looking for a grade school classmate by the name of Tony Doughty who, as a boy, had a dog named Jeep and attended Hubbard Woods School in Winnetka, Illinois. I asked that if her Tony Doughty was my Tony Doughty and he had been giving residents rides in an antique automobile, would she give him my email address and phone number and say I was trying to reach him. I turned off the computer and went to bed.

The next day, returning from taking the dogs on their two-mile walk, the voicemail light was blinking. The deep, familiar Hubbard Woods voice thanked me for tracking him down, gave his phone number and said we had a lot of years to talk about. Indeed we did.

Tony went through Williams, then did a stint in the Army. While I was hustling tactical nuclear warheads around Europe, Tony was doing counter-intelligence. He met and married Pat who was an exchange student from Iowa. A civilian again, Tony became a buyer for Marshall Field in Chicago, was recruited by Daytons in Minneapolis where he was not happy, and switched to managing a suburban department store. Attracted to the resort area of northern Minnesota, they bought a Ma & Pa clothing store in Walker and as the area grew it became three locations with thirty employees. The business was sold to a long-time associate and now Tony divides his energies between antique cars, Civil War history and grandchildren.

It is amazing what you can do with a search engine if you can pair names of long-lost friends with the right words.

Tony Doughty in 1922 Pierce Arrow

Bingo.

The definition of a “stronghold” is a hilltop fortress, a bulwark against the dangers of the surrounding world. So the question is, how does what appears to be an ancient European fortress come to occupy . . . → Read More: The Stronghold]]> Notes for August 3, 2009
(Thanks to the Strong Family Association of America for the invitation to speak at their annual meeting)

The definition of a “stronghold” is a hilltop fortress, a bulwark against the dangers of the surrounding world. So the question is, how does what appears to be an ancient European fortress come to occupy a hilltop overlooking the Rock River north of Oregon, Illinois?

Stronghold from the air, late 1950's

To find the answer, we have to begin in Galena, Illinois back in 1845 with the birth of Albert Bliss Strong. Jump ahead thirty years to 1875 and Albert has moved to Chicago where he is graduating from Rush Medical School at the head of his class. He is invited to join the faculty of Rush and he becomes a well-known and respected physician in Chicago.

Four years later, in 1879, Albert marries Ida Cook, daughter of alderman (city councilman) Ansel Cook, a prominent Chicago politician. Two years later tragedy strikes when, in 1881, Ida’s mother is scalded to death in a train wreck while on the way from Chicago to Libertyville, Illinois to visit relatives. This traumatic event probably triggered the loss shortly afterward of the child that Ida was carrying.

Two more years later, Walter Ansel Strong was born in Chicago to Albert and Ida on August 13, 1883. He had three brothers, Ralph, Edward, and Richard. Three years later, Albert left the faculty of Rush Medical and went into private practice a few blocks north of their home in downtown Chicago. His practice prospered for seven years until the Panic of 1893 and the resulting nationwide depression. The next year, Albert lost the sight in one eye, probably due to cancer. The next year, 1895, his health failed and he was institutionalized. Soon afterward, his son, Edward, aged 10, died of diphtheria, and immediately following Edward’s funeral, Ida took the youngest child, Richard, and went to live with relatives, farming out Ralph to relatives and leaving Walter, then 12 years old, to live in the downtown Chicago YMCA under the supervision of his father’s cousin, Victor Lawson, publisher of the Chicago Daily News.

The Lawsons were childless and did not intend to bring Walter into their family so it was arranged that he live at the YMCA, work for Lawson selling newspapers on the street during the day and attend Lewis Institute (later it became the Illinois Institute of Technology) in the evening. He did this from age 12 until he graduated with a degree in civil engineering at eighteen. Albert died in 1900, shortly before Walter graduated.

Walter then attended Beloit College in Wisconsin, holding a variety of jobs to support himself and his mother, including selling electrical appliances, running a roller skating rental business, and working at the Beloit Free Press. He also participated in sports, edited the college newspaper, and acted in theatrical productions.

After graduating in 1905, Walter moved back to Chicago to work as an audit clerk, a responsible position, at the Chicago Daily News. In 1908 he accompanied Victor Lawson to Europe, working as Lawson’s secretary, and by 1910 had become auditor and office manager of the Daily News. Walter also attended the John Marshall Law School during this time, graduating in 1912.

Walter Ansel Strong

Walter married Josephine Webster in 1913, and the couple settled in Evanston. They had five children: Walter Ansel Jr. (1914), Jonathan Webster (1917), Robert Kitchell (1919), Anne Haviland (1922), and David Seymour (1925). He continued to advance at the Daily News, gaining Victor Lawson’s trust and respect, and in 1921 was officially appointed business manager. Under his direction the Daily News acquired radio station WMAQ (formerly WGU), becoming one of the first newspapers to operate a radio station.

Victor Lawson died in August of 1925, leaving no instructions in his will regarding the disposition of the Daily News, and Walter spent the rest of the year working out the details of purchasing the newspaper.

Walter’s tenure as publisher of the Daily News coincided with Prohibition. The activities of gangsters and bootleggers such as Al Capone and Bugs Moran, as well as the machinations of mayor William Hale Thompson’s administration, kept Washington D.C. and the rest of the nation focused on Chicago. As publisher of a major Chicago newspaper during this tumultuous time, Walter became quite respected and well-known, serving on the board of directors of the American Newspaper Publisher’s Association, National Association of Broadcasters and International Advertising Association. In 1926 he traveled to Europe, meeting with French Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré as well as Benito Mussolini, then Prime Minister of Italy. He later spent time in Washington D.C. with Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, becoming particularly friendly with Hoover. As a highly admired representative of the newspaper industry and the Chicago community, he gave many speeches, including a well-received talk at the University of Chicago known as “Newspapers and the New Age”. Walter also oversaw the Daily News’ construction of a new, modern building on the Chicago River, which involved negotiating air rights over existing railroad property and presided over the paper’s move in 1929.

Josephine Webster Strong

Stronghold came to be built because Walter Strong met Josephine Webster. Josephine, tall and stately, was the daughter of Towner Keeney Webster who made his first fortune by inventing a collapsible bucket, essential to the transportation of grain from farms to grain elevators all over the country and from the elevators to railroad cars which brought the grain to processing and manufacturing plants in Chicago and Minneapolis. Conveyor belts were not efficient means of moving grain and grain augers had not been invented so something was needed that would scoop up large amounts of grain, carrying it up the conveyor, dump it, collapse so it could travel back down the underside of the conveyor and re-open and fill with grain. Towner made and lost several fortunes. During one of the prosperous times he bought a farm five miles north of Oregon, a small town a hundred miles west of Chicago. The farm, known as The Bee Tree, became the summer home for the Webster family.

To placate his wife, Towner Webster turned over to her an amount equal to a year’s expenses and the title to their Evanston home and to The Bee Tree, guaranteeing that whatever the outcome of his efforts at inventing and investing, the family could survive. It was a wise decision: at one point Towner invested, along with Samuel Langhorne Clemmens (AKA Mark Twain), in a newspaper linecasting machine only to see Ottmar Mergenthaler bring out the Linotype a full year before their machine was to be operational. Webster and Clemmens lost all their investments.

While Walter Strong worked at the Daily News, rising through the ranks, he met and courted Josephine and would arrange to spend some weekends and vacation time with the Webster family at Bee Tree. Walter would take the train from the Burlington station in Chicago after work and be picked up at the Oregon station by one of the Webster boys. On the return trip along Highway 2 it was impossible not to notice the beautiful forested bluff lying south of Mud Creek. It wasn’t much of a stretch for Walter to realize that it would be a perfect location for a summer home for his own family, close to the warm family group of the Websters that helped to make up for some of his own family loss.

Stronghold became Walter’s answer to McCormick’s fancy estate, Cantigny in suburban Chicago, and William Randolph Hearst’s opulent castle at San Simeon in California, but unlike McCormick who had the McCormick reaper fortune and Hearst who also had vast personal wealth, Walter could not afford to hire high-priced artisans, masons and carpenters and had to replace the lack of great wealth with humor and inventiveness.

Walter Strong, Josephine Webster, Henrietta Webster, Virginia Howland, Maurice Webster at Bee Tree

Stronghold was designed by Josephine’s youngest brother, Maurice Webster, an architect who had studied in Europe and had many commissions in the United States. Maurice, working with Walter, used the basic structure of a barn for the design of the castle. This made it easy to find experienced construction labor in the local area. The tower is basically a pair of large stacked silos and the main house is essentially a barn with bedrooms on the first floor instead of stalls and the Big Room upstairs instead of a haymow. The entrance/guard room and the bunk house wing are add-ons and the garage wing with caretaker quarters completes the space, with an intimate courtyard between the two.

The tower is technically two stacked silos. The bottom silo is three stories tall and has a solid ceiling, creating a strongly reinforced cylinder. Unable to continue the spiral stairs all the way up inside the tower, Maurice cut a door just below the third floor ceiling and continued the enclosed stairs up the outside of the building, re-entering the two-story upper silo farther up and around the tower.

Stronghold was completed in 1930. On May 10, 1931, Walter Strong died of a heart attack at the age of 47. He had only one year in residence with his family.

Col. Robert R. McCormick, publisher of the rival Chicago Tribune, hired detectives to find out if Walter had committed suicide, his theory being that the Daily News was on the point of failure and Walter wanted the insurance money to rescue his family. Proving suicide would have allowed McCormick to buy up the paper at liquidation prices. Several prominent doctors who examined the body a short time after his death concluded Walter died of natural causes.

Josephine outlived her husband by 30 years and maintained the family as a unit through the strength of her personality. She was a director and the largest shareholder at Fansteel Metallurgical Corp. which her husband helped start. Upon her death in 1961, Stronghold was sold as a church retreat and the winter house in Winnetka was burned to the ground by the local fire department as a training exercise.

Walter, Jr., avoided World War II by managing public relations at Fansteel, which was a government contractor, later became the publisher of a small, secondary market newspaper in Wisconsin. Jonathan served as a tank commander under Patton, was an architect, artist and had a company that made aluminum reproductions of colonial dinnerware. Robert was an engineering officer in WWII, ran a foreign car sales company and a company that made equipment for cleaning metal machine parts. Anne studied at the Art Institute in Chicago, moved to New York started and ran a magazine for children. David was killed in the months of fighting leading up to the Battle of the Bulge.

In later years the afternoon Chicago Daily News was paired with the morning Chicago Sun-Times and was later discontinued when suburban dailies took over the afternoon reading habits of people in the metropolitan area.

Walter Ansel Strong, Sr., was considered one of the last Progressive leaders of the era. His background, coming from a broken family and having raised himself from the age of twelve, kept his focus on the public good instead of “getting ahead” by focusing on accumulating wealth. Unlike the Tribune publisher, McCormick, who came from a wealthy family and believed that the upper class ruled because of innate superiority, Walter looked for and found people who became famous writers and editors, businessmen and public servants.

The Strong family is gratified that the property is being used for good work. Walter and Josephine would approve.

The speaker in the Big Room at Stronghold, courtesy Robert Ryder

Photos are available at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/20155950@N05/sets/
Click on “sets” and look for sets about Stronghold and Strong Family.

Video of Josephine Webster Strong’s “surprise” birthday party at Stronghold, 1958. Available here.

Materials regarding Walter Ansel Strong Sr. are on file at the Newberry Library, Chicago, and the Chicago History Museum courtesy of David Seymour Strong, who is writing a biography of his grandfather.

- – Stewart Brand, founder, Whole Earth . . . → Read More: When “Free” Isn’t…]]> “On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

- – Stewart Brand, founder, Whole Earth Catalog

Brand was speaking at the first Hackers’ Conference in 1984, addressing the tension between idealism and commerce that was already evident.

Milkweed and crown vetch in the Fox River Forest Preserve meadow July 16, 2009

Last April, after the snow had melted, we walked the meadow next to the boat landing in the Fox River Forest Preserve. It was a cold, blustery day and the dogs ran back and forth sniffing everything.  We . . . → Read More: Milkweed & Monarchs]]> Notes for July 16, 2009

Milkweed and crown vetch in the Fox River Forest Preserve meadow July 16, 2009

Last April, after the snow had melted, we walked the meadow next to the boat landing in the Fox River Forest Preserve. It was a cold, blustery day and the dogs ran back and forth sniffing everything.  We found a dozen milkweed pods wrapped in dried strands of vetch and had fun opening them and letting the seeds blow in clouds across the meadow.

When we came back today we enjoyed a parental pride in the masses of milkweed plants growing where the spring winds had sown them. We also enjoyed seeing Monarchs flitting from one to another. Now, we’re looking for signs of nibbling, evidence that the larval stage is snacking on one of their favorite foods.

We have a stand of milkweed in the garden next to the west-facing side of the garage, an ideal spot for the plants and the Monarchs.

We lived in the Hubbard Woods section of Winnetka, Illinois, during World War II three blocks from the western edge of town. That edge of town bordered an area called The Lagoons, peat bogs with a stream running through and some grassy play fields were we played during the long summer days and evenings. The Army set up artillery units back in the lagoons with anti-aircraft guns and big search lights to guard the northern approaches to Chicago. We delighted in trying to sneak up on the emplacements and being chased away by the crews.

Hubbard Woods families put in Victory Gardens along the north side Tower Road beyond the last street. The soil was black and moist and smelled peaty and rich and we loved sticking our fingers into it, making holes for the seeds. Our gardens grew prodigous amounts of vegetables and berries and there were “kapok parties” where groups of younger people would gather milkweed pods. The silk was used for making life vests. We bought two at a war surplus store in the late ’40s and tried them out in Lake Michigan. They sank.

I think it is true that the calendar is a valuable tool and it is also true that some minds in the administration have gone . . . → Read More: Media Notes: Alumni calendars and newspapers]]> Got worked up over the redesign of the Swarthmore College alumni calendar and despite having been kicked out after two years had the gall to post a diatribe on the class listserve:

I think it is true that the calendar is a valuable tool and it is also true that some minds in the administration have gone a bit squishy of late. The “classical” calendar is dear to us because it is familiar…but…also because it was, indeed, classical in its simplicity of design that put emphasis on really strong images “disirregardless” of the particular “theme” being covered.

This year’s calendar in particular fails on several counts, many already named by all of you. Here are some thoughts from an old graphic arts guy.

If they are getting their calendars from a “traditional” printer then the combination of top quality and best price will probably be found on a 2-color perfecting press (remember when the colors were black and maroon?). Traditional printers using 4-color presses (usually really 5-color so they can put on a UV coating over the four colors) are the most expensive.

If they are getting their calendars from one of the modern on-demand digital printers then they are most likely using a device similar to an ink-jet printer that resembles a very large office-size Xerox machine. They typically have multiple heads in staggered rows and are capable of laying down reasonably high quality images so 2-color or 4-color jobs are frequently run through the same line.

If it were up to me, I’d go with 2-color, good reproduction, very high quality images, a simple, classic layout and let the pictures speak for themselves. Here’s something to keep in mind…and this new calendar is a case in point: Color can and does frequently “take over” a visual presentation. If you go with black-and-white images then the content, the shapes of objects, the textures and contrasts can tell a detailed story. If you go with color you get unexpected or unintended results as we see in September’s photo of the Cosby Courtyard. The subject was supposed to be the courtyard but it became the striped stockings, plaid mini-shirt and wry smile of the co-ed. Did anyone really look at the courtyard? No, I didn’t think so.

The designer uses PhotoShop to over-screen a portion of the photo and then over-prints type…and clearly doesn’t know enough about type to realize that a type face with fine serifs over a screen will make difficulty reading. Especially because the over-screen lacks the degree of opacity to carry the type, never mind the screen effects on the type elements. There is a technique called “trapping” when you over-print where the program will “bump” one pixel on either side of the edge of the type up or down to make that edge stronger and the letters easier to read. In the old days we “trapped” using a pinpoint light in the darkroom to expose that edge. Nowadays they use PhotoShop…if they know what they’re doing. Not here, obviously.

Look at the July shot of the Shane Teaching Garden and tell me you can read that type in the lower right corner. Then look at the photo. Nice tones in the lower half…the reflections in the water…but look at the washed out trees, sky and house in the uppoer left quadrant. Come on, guys, even a codger like me tweak that part of the image with PhotoShop. There’s no excuse for this crap. Because that’s what this piece is, plain and simple. The composition of the main photos is extremely weak…May, June, October, December…what,… were they taken with a cell phone? Hey, listen, if you want to re-do that Scott Ampitheater shot with the leaves across the grass, get a camera with swings and tilts (lens board and film holder) and work a bit and you’ll have something that is in focus from nearest to farthest and it will stop you in your tracks as your eyes explore all the details. Not here. Not this one.

And paying for variable screens of colors around the calendar? What is that all about???

Finally, if they want us to hang a double-high calendar which requires clearing some important space out of our living areas, they’d better make it a work of art, something we want to look at all month, every month, all year. Don’t be telling me that you’re going to be doing that with this muddle. I think these people have been spending too much time talking to themselves and not enough looking for really outstanding examples of design and doing some good editing of photo art. This is decidedly not good.

We went back and forth with collections of objections mailed to the alumni office and finally on Jan 12, 2009 Sue Willis Ruff wrote:

Walt, I suspect everyone’s sick of the topic but me and thee, but I had to share this:

Tribune Retreats … When the Chicago Tribune launched a radical redesign last fall, the company’s chief innovation officer, Lee Abrams, warned in an internal memo that critics might savage the big-headlines-and-photos approach that often left just one or two stories on the front page. … –Sue

To which I replied:

Once took a Columbia University journalism course in newspaper design from Edmond C. Arnold back in the late 1960′s. I used his ideas on publications I managed. Ed, a wonderful teacher and a complete “character,” died February 20th 2007 at age 93. Ed changed the way newspapers looked in the first iteration of revamping tied to new technologies, in this case, the use of photocomposition and offset printing. It was suddenly possible to do with an Exacto knife and resin-coated paper what was impossible with pieces of lead type and zinc engravings. An early example of the new genre: USA Today from the Gannett organization.

The current iteration of makeovers is also technology driven…the Internet. Newspapers don’t know how to respond. They don’t know what or who they are. They are having an identity crisis, trying on different suits of clothes and hair styles in hopes of getting a date with a reader. So far, not much luck.

I stole the name of my blog (Ansel’s Ancient Anecdotes) from Ed who had published a book of short, pithy statements about design called Arnold’s Ancient Axioms, so named because they seemed to have withstood the test of time. He wrote a regular column on design for the weekly Publisher’s Auxiliary and always ended it with a design rule captioned with what would become the title of his most popular book. He re-designed hundreds of newspapers, including the Toronto Star, Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, Newsday, the Boston Globe, Louisville Courier-Journal, National Observer, Kansas City Star, among others.

Most of his work was in the period when major newspapers were moving from hotmetal makeup to computerized photocomposition…mid 1960′s to late 1970′s. He felt that newspaper design had been hamstrung by the mechanical limits of the hotmetal production process…long columns of type with some stacked heds. He advocated horizontal makeup so that the eye was caputred, brought into the story and held there, even when there were multiple stories on the page…each given it’s place. People who used his design principles did very well in getting and holding readership and did so until, as Ted Nelson predicted, computer screens took the place of printed pages. We are experiencing the turmoil of that paradyme shift.

The Christian Science Monitor is about to drop its daily printed edition in favor of web-only except for a weekend by-mail edition. They might get away with it because they have the church behind them. Other newspapers need to fundamentally re-think what people want, need and are willing to pay for in a newspaper in today’s marketplace. They’re trying, heaven knows, but having a very difficult time of it. My guess: Wednesday/Sunday newspapers will end up providing what we need, and they probably won’t look too much different than the current WP and NYT mid-week and Sunday editions. The Associated Press or something similar will have to provide “pool” reporting of national and international affairs for the web and then for summary and analysis by the newspapers.

The S’more calendar is, indeed, related to this whole phenomenon of packaging information to fit in today’s mix of technologies and social needs. The often-visceral responses to the calendar are part of the same phenomenon the Tribune readers experienced. Here are my thoughts:

Design is critically important but it must work…meet the needs of both the producers and the users of the product. Those needs change but certain basic rules remain. Communications that connect. Design that reinforces image of the issuing organization. Design that makes use of the physical way people look at things, the learned and behaviorial processes.

And I’ll repeat that bit about color producing unexpected or unintended results with this anecdote: I once designed a web site for a client that contained a section of pages showing their key employees. They wanted clients and prospects to feel comfortable about doing business with their organization so they profiled the people who had client contact. They paid a photographer to come in and do a mug shot and a workplace photo of each person…sitting at their desk, etc. When the photos were posted to the web the client was unhappy but they didn’t know quite why. It took about two minutes to figure out that the cause of the dissatisfaction was color. One customer service representative who had telephone contact with clients wore a very bright pink sweater the day they took the photos. Her picture wasn’t about her, it was about her sweater. Other people had colorful but distracting decorations around their desks that didn’t represent the client’s company attitude. We simply made the photographs black-and-white and suddenly the emphasis was on the person’s face and not drawn to bright clothing or colorful decorations.

I remember when Life magazine was filled with many amazing black-and-white photographs. Their decline and loss of readership came, in part, when they went to large color photographs that communicated less information than the many smaller black-and-white photographs had done. People felt they were not getting their “communications money’s worth” out of their investment (time and money) in Life magazine so they looked elsewhere.