Biography: James Wagenvoord

[James Wagenvoord]

James Wagenvoord: author/editor/publishing consultant. Born in Lansing Michigan, graduated from Duke University, worked in editorial management for Time Inc: (Life Magazine-- Editorial Business Manager, Asst to the Executive Editor, Chief of Time/LIFE Editorial Services); Field Publishing Corporation: Editorial Director; Reader’s Digest: Executive Editor trade publishing. Author of 43 published trade books including City Lives; Hangin’Out; The Doubleday Wine Companion; Miami Ink; Bikes and Riders, The Swim Book, Personal Style, and The Violent World of Touch Football. Currently working on Aging Up, the second volume of an unpublished memoir. Lives in Yardley, Pennsylvania with his wife and teen-age daughter.

[John Simkin]

James Wagenvoord: author/editor/publishing consultant. Born in Lansing Michigan, graduated from Duke University, worked in editorial management for Time Inc: (Life Magazine-- Editorial Business Manager, Asst to the Executive Editor, Chief of Time/LIFE Editorial Services); Field Publishing Corporation: Editorial Director; Reader’s Digest: Executive Editor trade publishing. Author of 43 published trade books including City Lives; Hangin’Out; The Doubleday Wine Companion; Miami Ink; Bikes and Riders, The Swim Book, Personal Style, and The Violent World of Touch Football. Currently working on Aging Up, the second volume of an unpublished memoir. Lives in Yardley, Pennsylvania with his wife and teen-age daughter.

Welcome to the Forum. I am sure a lot of researchers will be interested in your account of working at Life Magazine in 1963/4.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKwagenvoord.htm

[John Bevilaqua]

James Wagenvoord: author/editor/publishing consultant. Born in Lansing Michigan, graduated from Duke University, worked in editorial management for Time Inc: (Life Magazine-- Editorial Business Manager, Asst to the Executive Editor, Chief of Time/LIFE Editorial Services); Field Publishing Corporation: Editorial Director; Reader’s Digest: Executive Editor trade publishing. Author of 43 published trade books including City Lives; Hangin’Out; The Doubleday Wine Companion; Miami Ink; Bikes and Riders, The Swim Book, Personal Style, and The Violent World of Touch Football. Currently working on Aging Up, the second volume of an unpublished memoir. Lives in Yardley, Pennsylvania with his wife and teen-age daughter.

Welcome to the Forum. I am sure a lot of researchers will be interested in your account of working at Life Magazine in 1963/4.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKwagenvoord.htm

I can certainly second that emotion. I would also love to hear about what it was like in North Carolina at Duke University during the very pivotal and violent civil rights years. I can recall my trips as a teenager from Miami to attend the Duke University summer basketball camp near Lake Lure, North Carolina about halfway between Ashville and Hendersonville close to Mount Mitchell I think it was called. The town was called Gerton, as I recall. While riding on a Greyhound Bus from Florida through Georgia, South Carolina and then North Carolina in perhaps 1962 and 1963 I can vividly recall several cases where the bus driver enforced the "back of the bus" rules against Afro-Americans with the threat of immediate expulsion from the bus if compliance was not forthcoming. And in the various bus terminals in the Carolinas, there were always 2 Mens Rooms and 2 Ladies Rooms clearly marked "Colored" and "White". And there were even two water fountains also marked "Colored" and "White". On one trip at about 6:00 am in the morning we pulled into a station and I groggily stumbled towards the nearest bathroom when all of a sudden the white passengers started yelling at me

for no apparent reason. They pointed to the sign above the bathroom door and then I realized what was going on. Even the non-whites were looking at me to see what was going on and what I was going to do. I just looked at them, and said "Sorry!" and shrugged my shoulders as if to say: "Hey, I can't do anything else but go into the other bathroom. I didn't cause this situation and I certainly can't fix it either." The irony of saying sorry to them only struck me later. As if I was an interloper into their private domain when in fact it could have been inadvertently meant as: "Sorry, for the plight you are in, but I can not do anything about it!"

My tenure at the Duke basketball camp was during the latter end of the Vic Bubas reign, but he never showed up at the camp named after him because he was on the way out the door as I recall. We were all kind of sad that we did not get a chance to be recruited by Vic Bubas into Duke.

Later during a 1993 visit to Dallas for an ASK Conference, almost every bar or restaurant we went into still had an old fashioned bathroom attendant who was an aging Afro-American in almost all cases. What a throwback. Even in 1993, the remnants of the

deep south still survived in the very class conscious deep south including Texas.