How to Create a Great Magazine Out of Thin Air
Fifty years ago, Texas Monthly was little more than an idea dreamt up by a local lawyer with minimal experience in journalism. Then it was an actual thing. How did that happen? By William Broyles
Founder, Michael R. Levy (left) and founding editor-in-chief William Broyles in the Texas Monthly office around 1974.
Editor’s note: This article was part of Texas Monthly’s special fiftieth-anniversary issue.
It would not be the last time a writer pointed a loaded gun in my face during Texas Monthly’s first year.
In the fall of 1972, Gary Cartwright and I were making the rounds in Dallas. Gary was a journalist with a national reputation who had agreed to write a story for the first issue of a new magazine started by some young nobodies with no experience. I was the rookie editor, the nobody of nobodies. Gary was a real catch for us. If he were to write for our first issue, it would give us credibility, of which we had zero. But before Gary started writing, he wanted to put me to the test.
Texas Monthly’s premiere issue, February 1973
He took me to meet his crusty old editor at the Dallas Times Herald, who thought I was one of their copy boys. Then came the Dallas nightlife challenge. We started at the Colony Club, one of the classier joints on what remained of Dallas’s notorious Strip. I had a few drinks. Gary had more than a few, plus other substances, some of them legal. We met exotic dancers at various bars. They all knew Gary, as did the bartenders. Come midnight, Gary was just hitting his stride. He was in Hunter Thompson’s league as far as partying went. I was not.
Back then our per diem was $5 for food and $8 for a room. Gary, who was used to Sports Illustrated expense accounts, was not impressed. He’d arranged for us to stay in the apartment of his friend Pete Gent, so I went back there while Gary soldiered on into the Dallas night. Gent had played for the Dallas Cowboys and would soon publish a best-selling novel about life in the NFL. Like Gary, he was a substance tester, boundary pusher, and norm exploder. He was supposed to be out of town.
It was a restless night. Gent’s apartment was in the Love Field flight path. Two years earlier I’d been patrolling the jungles of Vietnam. Every two minutes or so, as I lay on Gent’s couch, a plane would come screaming into a landing. To me, each one sounded like enemy artillery fire. I had to fight the urge to yell “Incoming!” and throw myself onto the floor. I had just gotten to sleep when all the lights came on. A loaded gun was inches from my face. A very large human, under the influence of something far stronger than alcohol, was holding it.
Pete Gent.
“Who the f— are you?” he asked.
Gent thumbed the hammer back, his finger closing around the trigger. Gary was standing in the doorway. Without taking my gaze off Gent’s pinballing eyes, I spoke to Gary.
“Please. Tell him who I am.”
“You know this asshole?” Gent asked Gary.
Gary looked at me, then shook his head.
“I’ve never seen him before in my life.”
That memory comes to me while I’m reading through a bound volume of the first year of Texas Monthly. Dan Goodgame, the current editor in chief, has loaned me an office on the seventeenth floor of an elegant tower on Congress Avenue. Texas Monthly occupies the entire floor. That 1973 year was a half century ago, and we were all so young and felt like we could do anything. In those days each issue was a tightrope walk with no net. Each was a minor miracle. At some point years later, the miraculous became the normal, momentum built, the improvised became an institution, the guerrilla operation became an army. It’s all beyond what I could have imagined fifty years ago.
Trying to find the bathroom, I get lost, then lost again trying to find the kitchen, then lost again trying to get back to my temporary office. Along the way I walk down a hallway lined with the magazine’s nearly six hundred covers, arranged chronologically and mounted behind glass. I pass a state-of-the-art recording studio, where an audio team is producing a podcast episode. Texas Monthly isn’t just a magazine anymore. It’s a diversified media company with a strong online presence supported by a highly committed new owner, Randa Duncan Williams.
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ORIGINALLY POSTED IN FEBRUARY 2023 ©TEXAS MONTHLY