Since becoming a professional writer in 2007 with The Word Guild, it has been fascinating to learn more about how the world of publishing actually works. Alan Brinkley produced an intriguing book The Publisher which explores the life of Henry Luce. As the founder of TIME, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated magazines, Luce, says Brinkley, is ‘arguably the most important publisher’ of the last hundred years. I remember ‘cutting my teeth’ as a child on TIME and Life magazines to which my parents subscribed.
Luce’s parents sacrificially devoted their lives as missionaries in China. Being sent to boarding school robbed Luce of a healthy family upbringing, leaving him feeling alone and driven to impress others. Luce described his boarding school experience as a ‘hanging torture’, commenting: “I well sympathize with prisoners wishing to commit suicide.” Many missionaries, in hindsight, have regretted sending their children to boarding schools. The high valuing of academic education has sometimes caused well-meaning parents and their children to lose those vital family connections.
Born in Penglai City in China, Luce first came to North America at age 15. Everything was strange and different to him. Luce had an insatiable curiosity to understand unfamiliar settings. The novelist John Hersey who worked for Luce said that “the most attractive thing about Luce was that he was relentlessly curious about absolutely everything; he was delighted to learn any fact that he had not known before.” This curiosity was at the heart of the inventiveness of the four magazines that he birthed.
Luce inherited his parent’s missionary zeal to connect with a foreign culture and make a helpful difference. North America for Luce was always a foreign culture that he strove to understand. He always felt like an outsider. No matter how hard he strived, he never really felt like he fit in. Brinkley describes Luce as a “fundamentally shy, lonely and somewhat awkward man with few true friends… (yet he) had the ability to connect publicly with millions of strangers”. In many ways, Luce was an emotional orphan. He once said that he did not have a high regard for ‘feelings’, that they were ‘secondary’ to thought. One colleague described Luce as ‘the loneliest man I’ve ever known.’
While at Yale, Luce worked endlessly seeking to be accepted by the other students. As a missionary’s child, he lacked the money and position of other Yale students. Instead he gained acceptance through his keen inquisitive mind, and his involvement in helping produce the Yale Daily News. In partnership with fellow Yale Editor Britton Hadden, Luce birthed an unlikely newsmagazine in 1923 called TIME. Seventy percent of TIME subscribers were younger business executives under age 46. Brinkley says that Luce’s magazines contributed to ‘the birth of a national mass culture to serve a new and rapidly expanding middle class.’
Sadly Luce’s career success was often at the cost of his family life. Divorcing his first wife, he turned to the glamorous Clare Boothe, having what Brinkley described as a marriage made in hell. Philip Seib said that they were ‘both intensely self-centered and exceptionally ambitious…a perfect formula for making each other miserable.”
Luce always believed that his magazines could make a positive difference and shape a better world. The image of the Good Samaritan was a strong motivator in Luce’s thinking. In 1954, Luce put Billy Graham on the front cover of TIME magazine, and invited Billy Graham and six other leaders to write essays in Life magazine on the theme of National Purpose. The late Billy Graham said in Life: “We must recapture our moral strength and our faith in God.” Luce re-explored his faith and became a regular attender at Madison Presbyterian Church. TIME became an active supporter of civil rights and desegregation, with TIME reporters occasionally being beaten and injured.
As Alan Brinkley put it, “Henry Luce –for all his many flaws and sometimes noxious biases – was an innovator, a visionary and a man of vast and daunting self-confidence.” In this time of great technological and cultural change, we can all learn from the relentless curiosity, inventiveness and missionary zeal of Publisher Henry Luce.
The Rev. Dr. Ed Hird, BSW, MDiv, DMin
– previously published in the North Shore News/Deep Cove Crier
P. S. Click this Amazon link to view for free the first two chapters of our new novel Blue Sky.
“I’m afraid there’s been an accident…”
Sandy Brown and her family have just moved to Spokane, Washington where her husband, Scott, is pastoring a new church. With a fresh start, Sandy is determined to devote more time to her four children. But, within weeks of settling in their new life, the Brown family is plunged into turmoil.
Sandy receives shocking news that her children aren’t safe, which brings back haunting memories of the trauma she experienced as a girl. Then, the unthinkable happens…
A brutal attack puts Sandy on the brink of losing everything she’s loved. Her faith in God and the family she cherishes are pushed to the ultimate limit.
Is healing possible when so many loved ones are hurt? Are miracles really possible through the power of prayer? Can life return to the way it was before?
Blue Sky reveals how a mother’s most basic instinct isn’t for survival… but for family.
If you’re a fan of Karen Kingsbury, then you’ll love Blue Sky. Get your copy today on paperback or kindle.
-The sequel book Restoring Health: body, mind and spirit is available online with Amazon.com in both paperback and ebook form. Dr. JI Packer wrote the foreword, saying “I heartily commend what he has written.” The book focuses on strengthening a new generation of healthy leaders. Drawing on examples from Titus’ healthy leadership in the pirate island of Crete, it shows how we can embrace a holistically healthy life.
To receive a signed copy within North America, just etransfer at ed_hird@telus.net, giving your address. Cheques are also acceptable.
-Click to purchase the Companion Bible Study by Jan Cox (for the Battle of the Soul of Canada) in both paperback and Kindle on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca
-Click to purchase the Companion Bible Study by Jan Cox (for the Battle of the Soul of Canada) in both paperback and Kindle on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca
To purchase any of our six books in paperback or ebook on Amazon, just click on this link.
When Alexander Fleming’s picture turned up on the front cover of Time magazine, the byword stated “His penicillin will save more lives than war can spend”. A vivid example of this ‘miracle’ was the usage of penicillin on D-Day to save 3,000 on Normandy Beach from deadly gangrene. Some researchers consider penicillin to be one of the key top-secret weapons that helped the Allies win World War II.
It is hard for our modern generation to fully appreciate that before penicillin, even an infected pinprick or a tiny cut might be lethal. Hospitals were full of people with easily caught infections raging out of control. Children died regularly from scarlet fever, from infections of the bones, throat, stomach, or brain. It is no exaggeration to say that many of you reading this article would not be here today if it weren’t for the miracle of antibiotics touching you and your extended family.
In 1881, Alexander Fleming was born in Ayrshire in the lowlands of southwestern Scotland. A playground accident smashed the bridge of his nose and left him looking like a battered boxer. Andre Maurois said that Fleming had those qualities which many attribute to the Scots: a capacity for hard and sustained work, a combative spirit which refuses to admit defeat, a steadfastness and loyalty which creates respect and affection, and a true humility which protects against pretentiousness and pride.
Affectionately called Little Flem, his gift of silence appeared to be inexhaustible. One colleague said that Fleming ‘could be more eloquently silent than any man I have ever known.’ His capacity for silence was only matched by his capacity for waiting – and for hanging on, an attribute that greatly helped him in his penicillin adventure.
The body’s fight with infection was Fleming’s abiding interest. One of Fleming’s first breakthroughs was in the discovery of lysozyme, a natural antiseptic contained in human tears and saliva. Fleming’s method of collecting lysozyme was to recruit a passing student or laboratory boy and drop lemon juice in his eye! Eventually Fleming switched to the use of egg white which has a stronger concentration of lysozyme.
Lysozyme, unfortunately, ended up being an embarrassment to Fleming because it proved useless in killing harmful diseases. As a result, his fellow colleagues mostly treated Fleming’s later penicillin discovery as if it were another laboratory dead-end. Alexander Fleming always said, ‘We shall hear more about lysozyme one day’. With thousands of scientific papers now written about it, the Russians use lysozyme for preserving caviar; doctors add lysozyme to cow-milk to reproduce the component structure of human milk, as well as for the treatment of eye and intestinal infections.
Fleming, being a ‘packrat’, never liked to throw anything away. One day, Fleming noticed a blue mould growing on one of his unwashed petri dishes. He seized the moment and changed the world forever. From that moment, Fleming became obsessed with penicillin mould, even using his friends’ moldy old shoes. Fleming showed amazing ingenuity in his makeshift creation of the first penicillin ‘factory’, employing devices like oilcans, biscuit tins, dustbins, bedpans, milk churns, and bookracks!
For twelve long years after his 1928 discovery of penicillin, Fleming faced skeptical indifference. Penicillin was a medical Cinderella that no one wanted to dance with. ‘The man of genius’, writes Lord Beaverbrook, ‘ is often an egotist. When, as sometimes happens, he is simple and retiring, the world is inclined to underestimate his gifts…’
In 1937 Howard Florey and Ernst Chain of Oxford purified Fleming’s lysozyme. From there, they purified Fleming’s penicillin, making it stable, concentrated, and more useful.
When Alexander Fleming turned up in Oxford, Chain was taken completely by surprise. He had thought that Fleming was dead! Fleming generously said of the two,‘We all owe a lot to Florey, Chain and their co-workers. They did not initiate penicillin but they put it on the map as an effective drug.’
By freeze-drying it at a low temperature with a neutral pH, Chain and Florey were able to purify penicillin to become a thousand times more powerful than Fleming’s original mold. Once completely purified, penicillin became a million times stronger than at first!
By one biographer’s account, Fleming was given 25 honorary degrees, 26 medals, 18 prizes, 13 decorations, the freedom of 15 cities and boroughs, and honorary membership in 89 academies and societies. Both Florey and Fleming were knighted in 1944, and in 1945 Fleming, Florey and Chain were jointly given the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine. Medical centers, research institutes, and even a moon crater were named in honour of the beloved ‘father’ of penicillin. It meant a lot to Fleming as a Scot when he was elected as Rector of Edinburgh University in 1951. When Fleming received an ovation at a Spanish bullfight, 20,000 fans broke out into mass hysteria. The famous Spanish scientist Don Gregorio Maranon said of Fleming that ‘God selected him to carry out the greatest miracle which humanity has ever seen’.
Yet despite all the honours showered on Fleming, fame didn’t spoil him. He remained a simple humble man, not even bothering to patent penicillin for personal profit. When Fleming was asked to what he attributed his success, he said: ‘I can only suppose that God wanted penicillin, and that this was his reason for creating Alexander Fleming.’
Countless millions have been saved physically through Fleming’s sacrificial work on penicillin. Countless millions have been saved spiritually through Jesus’ sacrificial work on the cross. When is the last time that we thanked God for such amazing acts of generosity?
The Rev. Dr. Ed Hird, BSW, MDiv, DMin
-previously published in the North Shore News/Deep Cove Crier
P. S. Click this Amazon link to view for free the first two chapters of our new novel Blue Sky.
“I’m afraid there’s been an accident…”
Sandy Brown and her family have just moved to Spokane, Washington where her husband, Scott, is pastoring a new church. With a fresh start, Sandy is determined to devote more time to her four children. But, within weeks of settling in their new life, the Brown family is plunged into turmoil.
Sandy receives shocking news that her children aren’t safe, which brings back haunting memories of the trauma she experienced as a girl. Then, the unthinkable happens…
A brutal attack puts Sandy on the brink of losing everything she’s loved. Her faith in God and the family she cherishes are pushed to the ultimate limit.
Is healing possible when so many loved ones are hurt? Are miracles really possible through the power of prayer? Can life return to the way it was before?
Blue Sky reveals how a mother’s most basic instinct isn’t for survival… but for family.
If you’re a fan of Karen Kingsbury, then you’ll love Blue Sky. Get your copy today on paperback or kindle.
-The sequel book Restoring Health: body, mind and spirit is available online with Amazon.com in both paperback and ebook form. Dr. JI Packer wrote the foreword, saying “I heartily commend what he has written.” The book focuses on strengthening a new generation of healthy leaders. Drawing on examples from Titus’ healthy leadership in the pirate island of Crete, it shows how we can embrace a holistically healthy life.
To receive a signed copy within North America, just etransfer at ed_hird@telus.net, giving your address. Cheques are also acceptable.
-Click to purchase the Companion Bible Study by Jan Cox (for the Battle of the Soul of Canada) in both paperback and Kindle on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca
-Click to purchase the Companion Bible Study by Jan Cox (for the Battle of the Soul of Canada) in both paperback and Kindle on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca
To purchase any of our six books in paperback or ebook on Amazon, just click on this link.
Born in Penglai City in China, Luce first came to North America at age 15. Everything was strange and different to him. Luce had an insatiable curiosity to understand unfamiliar settings. The novelist John Hersey who worked for Luce said that “the most attractive thing about Luce was that he was relentlessly curious about absolutely everything; he was delighted to learn any fact that he had not known before.” This curiosity was at the heart of the inventiveness of the four magazines that he birthed.
Sadly Luce’s career success was often at the cost of his family life. Divorcing his first wife, he turned to the glamorous Clare Boothe, having what Brinkley described as a marriage made in hell. Philip Seib said that they were ‘both intensely self-centered and exceptionally ambitious…a perfect formula for making each other miserable.”
“We must recapture our moral strength and our faith in God.” Luce re-explored his faith and became a regular attender at Madison Presbyterian Church. TIME became an active supporter of civil rights and desegregation, with TIME reporters occasionally being beaten and injured.
Sandy Brown and her family have just moved to Spokane, Washington where her husband, Scott, is pastoring a new church. With a fresh start, Sandy is determined to devote more time to her four children. But, within weeks of settling in their new life, the Brown family is plunged into turmoil.
Edhird's Blog 