Remembering MM’s first 20 years
This issue celebrates twenty years of the Marquette Monthly. Two hundred and forty months without a miss.
If you have never worked on a newspaper, daily or weekly, or on a monthly magazine, you probably have little idea of just how difficult it is.
You might be led by the calendar to believe that a monthly is the easiest…after all, editors and staff have a whole month to work on the publication.
Hah! Would you be wrong. In many respects, a monthly is a daily once a month. But often it is even more difficult because a daily publication has its staff on hand all of the days while a daily-once-a-month recruits many of its important writers for each issue.
Writers, knowing that the publication is a monthly, almost never meet deadlines, because, after all, it is a monthly. Can the editor fire the writer who doesn’t meet deadline? Of course, but most often that is not a wise choice and it is this almost impossible choice that makes editors and publishers age more quickly than normal people. So, I say, hurrah to the two publishers the Monthly has had and to the staff that ages with them.
There is a lot of stuff in this issue about the growth and brief history of MM. Mary Kinnunen, founding publisher, modeled MM after the hugely successful Ann Arbor Observer. The Monthly was, I think, a reader success from the very first issue.
Her account elsewhere in this issue of how I came aboard is quite accurate. The existing food column was terrible. I do detect a note of some petulance in her comments here, though. I think it is important to note that the “Food and Other Important Things” column was a readers’ choice from the very beginning.
The first years of the food column were years of criticism of food establishments. (I was even accused once of being the cause of the failure of a not very good restaurant. It’s unlikely that the column ever had that much power, though.)
When I started the New York Deli in 1993, I had to give up the critic’s job for area restaurants, of course. But people like to read criticism and the food columns drew much comment, certainly not all of it favorable.
There was one motel owner along the US-41 strip who refused to offer copies of the Monthly to his customers because it criticized local business, which he felt it should not do. I was a modest investor in the Monthly and its managing editor for some years.
The MM logotype used enlargements of the capital M key on my Olivetti portable typewriter…a wonderfully built Italian instrument of almost no current use that now resides at the MM Cottage. The short story contest, with a reasonable reward to the winner, was my project, too.
We did two food “studies” that turned out to be great fun for the staff and friends. The first was an attempt to select the best pasty. Pasties were bought by a single team, coded so that we tasters would not know where it came from and then judged by each staff person and the results calculated.
The second so-called study was for the best pizza. You can imagine what a mess this was. The procedure was the same as for pasties, only there were far more pizza places than pasty purveyors, and we had boxes of pizza all over the apartment in Mary’s mother’s home. I don’t recall now who the winners were in each category, but I do remember that one of the pasty producers who did not win was pretty upset.
I think I should tell you here of the most wonderful, mostly accurate letter of criticism of my writing and that of Jeff Eaton. This letter came neatly typed and the criticism the writer launched against us was quite accurate and possibly needed, too. The letter’s killing failure was that it was not signed.
Mary decided, and we agreed, that she should publish the letter, but we needed to determine the writer. We began as thorough an investigation as possible to find the writer; we went so far as to publish a request for the writer to contact us. If the writer needed anonymity, we could offer that only after determining who the author was. Nothing.
Even after all these years, I think it would be fun to hear from the writer if he or she is around.
It was the purchase of the Monthly by Pat Ryan O’Day that saved its life. There is little to no doubt that the Monthly would not exist today if this sale had not occurred. Pat came out of a publishing background and knew how to manage a publication like the Monthly.
Shortly after the sale, I had been tipped off by one of my agents that a number of Pat’s older friends and acquaintances had been urging her to drop my column because it disturbed the restaurant status quo.
At our first meeting (we had known each other and worked together many years before), this matter came up. I said that it was her prerogative, but I did want to point out that I knew who was urging her to drop the column, and I just wanted to ask if she knew how many of these friends ever ate out.
We have, from time to time, had disagreements, of course, but never one of such significance that we were about to part ways. I have always tried not to infringe on her authority as publisher and she, in return, has never attempted to interfere with my very real freedom to write as I pleased.
It’s pretty hard to get a better professional relationship than this. I think it has taken very hard work and much restraint to guide the Monthly as she has.
So, hurrah for another twenty years, although I suspect somewhere along the way there will be another writer for “Food and Other Important Things.”
—Don Curto

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