Dear Mr. Ross:

I wish I could have been there
a century ago, sitting in what I imagine
was your decidedly un-hip apartment,
you brainstorming from a sprawling,
padded armchair, your wife Jane
at the typewriter—the two of you
birthing a magazine with input from
assorted writer and artist friends.

I fancy myself among your hip crowd,
which, of course, you did not call yourselves,
because you weren’t yet the literati
of New York, the ones anyone who was
anyone wanted at their parties.

I’d have given anything to sit next to
Mrs. Parker, as you called Dorothy, even
if she hit me with one of her zingers,
and listen to Mr. Benchley joyfully trade
clever lines with Mr. Woollcott. And over
there, quietly in the corner, Andy White,
the wizard of short essays, still decades
away from penning Charlotte, the spider,
and his beloved Katharine, the sterling
fiction editor, who shaped some of
the best writers of the 20th century.

And if, by some chance, I could have
had a word with you, I’d have asked
if there might be a spot for me on
your soon-to-be beloved New Yorker,
the magazine destined to weather
a whole century, the best of the best,

whether you could foresee it or not,
your dream come true, one that
so many of us admire to this day.

Sincerely yours,

Jan Haag

•••

Harold Ross (a high school dropout-turned-newspaperman from Colorado who read dictionaries and Fowler’s “Modern English Usage” for pleasure) founded The New Yorker magazine with his wife and co-editor Jane Grant (the first woman reporter in The New York Times city room) in 1925. That was after Ross had been to war and edited the Army’s Stars and Stripes newspaper, after which he served as editor of three other New York magazines.

The New Yorker thrived under Ross’s leadership until his death in 1951, becoming a source of in-depth reporting, political and cultural commentary, fiction, poetry and humor, which it maintains to this day.