EDITOR'S LETTER

You’re probably wondering about our logo.

“Look at this, Evelyn. It just came in the mail. Arizona Highways has a new ... what’s that doohickey on the front cover called? Is that a title? Or a nameplate?”

“I think it’s called a logo, dear. It’s also called a masthead.”

Evelyn is right. And yes, it is different, but it’s not new. It made its debut in March 1952. For one month. The next month, George Avey and Raymond Carlson, our founding fathers, reverted to the logo we’d used in February. The new logo came back in May, and then it disappeared again until December 1953. In January, it was abandoned yet again. The on-again, off-again continued until July 1955, when the mad scientists finally stopped experimenting and made it our official logo. For a while.

Despite so much consistency with everything else, we’ve been pretty fickle when it comes to our logo. Unlike Coke, IBM and Bass Ale, whose red-triangle logo hasn’t changed since 1875, ours has had more than a dozen variations over the years. Maybe more. The current version has been around since January 2009, which makes it one of the graying druids in our pantheon of doohickeys.

The idea to set it aside this month and flash back to 1952 came to me at a magazine conference. I was sitting in a hollow room at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver. The speaker was interesting, but I was on deadline and had to figure out which images would be running in this month’s portfolio. As I was flipping through the photos, I came to an image of two horseback riders in the desert near Tucson. There’s the cover, I thought. But I pictured it with an older logo. Something from the ’50s. I was sitting with a colleague from a Toronto-based magazine. I asked her if she thought the idea was crazy. She didn’t think it was crazy. So, in the middle of the keynote, I emailed our publisher, he signed off and ... voila!

There is no golden era in the history of this magazine. The archive is too deep. Like the Packers roster in the Lombardi years. Or any album by Drake. But the 1950s were special. In his first column of the decade, Mr. Carlson wrote: “To you and you, whoever you are, wherever you are, we hope 1950 will be a good year, full of sunshine and bright, clear skies.”
 

His words set the stage for an era in which Mr. Carlson’s vision for the magazine kicked in and our circulation skyrocketed around the globe. Everything was better: Ansel Adams, Esther Henderson, Allen Reed, Ray Manley, David Muench and others were pushing the boundaries of landscape photography; illustrators such as Ted DeGrazia and Larry Toschik were turning our pages into artwork; and our writers, including David’s mother, Joyce Rockwood Muench, were as impressive as the 4x5 film and the oil-based paintings.

For this issue, we focused on the photography, but if we’d had more room, we would have resurrected some of the old stories and illustrations. We might have made room for some of the letters to the editor, too. From an editor’s perspective, that’s the mother lode of the archive. And because of our broad circulation, the letters came from all over the world.

“You may be interested to know that, out of curiosity, I checked our shelves yesterday and found that not one copy of all the back numbers of Arizona Highways was in the library. Every one was out in circulation.” That letter was sent to us by Ann Forbes Fraser, who worked for the American Library in Paris.

Of course, there were corrections, too. “As one who for years has enjoyed Arizona Highways — which first came to my desk when I was on the New York Herald Tribune —  I wish to call your attention to some minor errors in the article Buffalo Robes on the Hoof. It so happens that I was with Theodore Roosevelt on the only hunting journey he made in Arizona. The herd of buffalo was there at the time, but T.R. had nothing to do with getting it there.” The letter was signed: “Nicholas Roosevelt, Big Sur, California.” Nicholas was the president’s first cousin.

And then there was this letter, from May 1950: “I thank you from my heart for the gift of Arizona Highways! It has charm for us to see a country so different from ours which is only flowers and forests. I never tire of examining again its illustrations so admirably made, and wondering about this country that I shall never see in reality but only in imagination.” Turns out, the letter was from Dr. Albert Schweitzer, and it was sent from what was then known as French Equatorial Africa.

Seven decades later, we still think that letter is pretty cool. We like that old doohickey on the cover, too. And everything else that our founding fathers masterminded in the 1950s. As Mr. Carlson used to say: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”