One Princetonian is taking the reins from another at Time magazine, in a major media change announced earlier this week.
Richard Stengel '77 will replace longtime friend Jim Kelly '76 as managing editor of Time, the magazine's editor-in-chief announced in an email to his staff, calling the two "oldest of friends." Kelly is being promoted to the newly created position of Managing Editor of Time Inc., overseeing the companies' more than 150 magazines.
The connection between Kelly and Stengel extends beyond their employers and matching undergraduate diplomas. Kelly and Stengel have been close since their Princeton days.
Stengel even set up Kelly with his wife, then an editor at GQ. Appropriately, a newspaper photo eventually united the pair.
"Her picture was in The New York Times, one of the party pictures," Stengel said in an interview this week. "Jim called me up and said, 'Is that the girl you were going to introduce me to?' I said yes. He said, 'Okay, I'll call her.' "
Years earlier, a love of journalism had also brought Stengel and Kelly together. Kelly remembers admiring Stengel's work in John McPhee '53's seminar, The Literature of Fact, where the two met during the spring semester of 1976.
"I remember reading a profile [Stengel had] written about Bill Bradley ['65]. It was so terrific, it was clear to me that he would be the best writer in the class," Kelly said in an interview with The Daily Princetonian. "There was one phrase ... he talked about how Bill Bradley would run down the court looking like 'a French woman hurrying home with the morning baguette.' "
Princeton memories
Stengel chuckled over such examples of Kelly's "almost supernatural memory."
"Jim is my memory of what happened in my life," he said. "It's like he's looking at a calendar."
Kelly, on the other hand, accused Stengel of some convenient memory lapses. "Rick Stengel and I were in Cottage [Club] together, but he will never admit it," he said, adding that it had become a running joke in the newsroom during Stengel's previous stint at Time several years ago.
"I wasn't a big fan of eating clubs when I was there," admitted Stengel, who said he left Cottage after less than a year as a member. Yet he still has some fond memories.
"In the afternoon you could go in and have peanut butter and apple butter sandwiches and coffee," he said. "I am not a big fan of peanut butter, but I had never had apple butter before, and it's wonderful. That was the best thing about it."
Kelly recalled his friend as "a star on campus," adding that he "certainly knew of him" before the two met in McPhee's class.
Kelly, a Missouri native, worked as a research assistant and as a bartender at the pub in Chancellor Green. "I was a bartender, then was promoted ... to being a checker at the door." He chuckled at the small-scale parallel to his current situation.
Courtesy Call
Kelly has worked at Time since one year after he graduated from Princeton. He had planned to attend Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism until he paid "a courtesy call" to McPhee. McPhee set Kelly up with a contact at Time who eventually gave him a job.
"My debt to [McPhee] is so great," Kelly said, adding that The Literature of Fact "changed my life" and inspired him to go into journalism.
"That course was easily worth my entire Princeton tuition," he said.
"The hero of this tale is John McPhee," Stengel agreed. "I will shout it to the rooftops till the cows come home."
The pair have kept in touch with McPhee over the years, and even had dinner with him in Princeton the day he won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for "Annals of the Former World."
"He was just as absolutely calm and unimpressed with himself as ever," Stengel said. "He only halted the teaching of his class for about 10 minutes to get claps on the back and then went back to teaching."
Stengel himself taught a course titled Politics and the Press at Princeton in 1999, which he said was "harder than I thought."
"It was an interesting experiment, but it made me think that teaching is not for me," he said.
Besides writing for publications like The New Yorker and The New Republic, Stengel also worked as a speechwriter for Bill Bradley during his 1999 Democratic primary bid and co-wrote Nelson Mandela's autobiography, "A Long Walk to Freedom." He was then Time's culture editor and later national editor. In 2004, he became president of the Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
Kelly said that since managing editors generally don't choose their successors, he had no direct say in selecting Stengel. Still, given his impressive resume, Stengel didn't really need his help. "John [Huey] had a rough idea of my short list, and Rick was on everyone's short list."
"I don't see how I could have appointed Rick because we're so close," Kelly added. "How do you appoint the usher at your wedding?"
McPhee, who is traveling, could not be reached for comment.
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