Rich And Famous

RICH AND FAMOUS

UP FRONT

Allan Girdler

Graduation time. June, the end of the school year, the quest for careers and jobs and all that. Even so, despite knowing that graduation season is followed by people looking for work, this call was different.

Nice sounding young man, who gave his name and asked if I could spare a few minutes of my time to help him. I laughed out loud. He was puzzled, so I asked if he’s read the morning paper. Oh, he said, you mean the article on getting job interviews.?

Right. This story said the way to get your foot in the door is to call the man in charge and ask for his advice.

My caller said yes, he'd read the article. Not only that, he said, the technique works.

And I’m sure it does. Who of us powerful tycoons of any persuasion can resist the opportunity to recall the long hard struggle to the top, to thank the faceless little people who helped us on the way up, to pass along our hard-earned wisdom?

However, what success I’ve enjoyed has been entirely the result of good luck and the inability to play the piano at parties. I was thus the wrong man on which to use this technique, even if Ed had a job to dispense, which I don't.

That may have been just as well. My caller was surprised to learn we had no entry-level jobs. He thought there was a teeming officeful of helpers here, that squads of riders zoom into our vast complex and report to another squad of staff members who translate the data into stories.

This misimpression isn't new to me. Our own New York office calls and asks to speak to one of my assistants. Alas I have no assistants and precious little assistance. This is a big, slick magazine produced by a small and scruffy staff.

But I do give good advice.

Because it’s graduation time, and because we get lots of letters from readers who’d like to get into this business and because this and all other magazines are always looking for new talent, I’m taking this opportunity to pass along the best advice I ever got.

It came when I was on the other side of the fence, that is, I was about to graduate from college, I’d worked as a mechanic, done a little club racing, had been reading the magazines since grade school and I figured I was the perfect man for a magazine job.

I wrote to John R. Bond, my hero then as now, asking for a job.

He turned me down. He did it in the nicest possible way. I’m sorry I didn’t save the letter but it was so good and useful I remember the important parts.

In effect, he said I was one of thousands of readers who write every year (June again) and ask for work. I probably had the qualifications, the enthusiasm, perhaps the talent.

What I didn’t have was some way to distinguish myself from all those other guys. What I should do, he said, was sit down and work out what I could do that other people weren’t doing. What did I know that other motorheads would like to know? What was going on where I lived that could be put into a useful story?

So I took his advice. Obviously it worked. (If I was going to act important and tell about my career I'd add here that it took nine years to go from eager applicant to actual member of a staff, but of course I’m not that sort of tycoon.)

There is a further application for all this. I have dealt with this subject before, in fact even did up a letter containing the above advice and have been sending to applicants. And we generally appear in the various guidelines for freelance and potential freelance contributors.

This happens on purpose.

We need stories.

When I write that, I flinch. To say such a thing invites contributions, in turn bringing a need for us to reject great piles of material, offending those who tried to do what we asked them to do.

To dodge some of this, please note that we are a terrible place to sell a short story. We don’t use them. Poems likewiseAnd while we’d like to see more about touring we can’t go all the good places ourselves we cannot use fuzzy snapshots and handwritten accounts of the hamburger stands, campgrounds and mechanical disasters experienced on the average summer vacation. We aren’t a racing magazine and we thus can’t use pictures and text about local events, or even national races unless the photos are very, very good and arrive the day after the race. Monthly magazines are terribly involved productions. This issue is dated June, which means it will be in the mail the first week of May and on the newsstand the middle of May, and to get it here from the printer requires us to ship the stories to the printer (in Illinois) from our office (in California) the first week of April, so we had to write the stories in March and that’s why you’ll read in May about the Daytona races that happened two months before that.

(What a lecture this is turning out to be. My mother always thought I should have been a teacher.)

Next, if you have an idea you’d probably better not ask if we’d like it. We won't steal the idea, but we don’t know if we want a story until we see it. Nor does the idea always do the story justice. If I’d been asked if we’d like an article about a cross-country trip on a Norton that didn’t happen because the Norton broke and had to be shipped home, I’d have said No, Nortons that don’t run aren’t news. Luckily Peter Egan didn’t ask. He wrote the story, and we discovered the greatest talent to ever appear on these pages.

Now that you know what we don’t want, what do we want? Technical articles, for one. We always need more on how to fix or repair or restore yourbike. If you’ve figured out a better way, tell us. We aren’t so much interested in the product, your restored Marusho or Matchless, as we are in how you painted the tank from a spray can or sealed all the oil leaks.

Pictures. An important part of a contributor's guidlines is that we prefer black and white to color. We have a limit on how many color pictures we can use, so the odds are you’ll sell us more black and white. True, it’s harder to do good black and white than color, but that’s your problem.

And that’s how it works.

That’s also a long way from where I began this sermon. Never mind that we don’t have any jobs open, nor that I really haven't told you how to get rich and famous.

Back to that caller. I mentioned that another magazine is advertising for help. He said he saw the ad, but doesn’t think much of the magazine and would rather start at the top.

I would too, I said, but I’m not looking for a job.