Fred Smith traces a career in sports journalism

There is a lot to be said for being in the right place at the right time. For Fred Smith, that meant being in New York during what was a golden age of magazine publishing. Along the way, on “The Road to Wainscott,” as his new book is titled, he founded what is the best-selling single issue of a magazine on American newsstands, Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue.

As Mr. Smith’s breezy, boldface-name-filled memoir informs, his career went well beyond that single achievement. Yet as many readers will rediscover next week, when the 2010 edition appears, with the possible exception of Time’s “Person of the Year” publication, no magazine generates more excitement than the one founded 45 years ago.

Mr. Smith, who will celebrate his 85th birthday in April, was born in Montgomery, Alabama. According to a family account, his parents double-dated with Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Mr. Smith was born the year “The Great Gatsby” was published. Frederick Rutledge Smith, Mr. Smith’s father and namesake, was a businessman, and through that side of his family Mr. Smith can trace his ancestry back to two signers of the Declaration of Independence. On his mother’s side, Mr. Smith’s great-grandfather was a Confederate soldier who was captured by Morgan’s Raiders.

Mr. Smith grew up with a younger brother and sister and worked various jobs as his parents moved because of his father’s positions, including ones with the Works Progress Administration during the Depression. He attended the University of Alabama but left in the spring of 1943 to join the Air Corps. He learned to fly a variety of planes and became a navigator on a B-17 bomber, known as the Flying Fortress, and then a B-29. But World War II ended before he saw action overseas, and Mr. Smith returned to Alabama to finish his college degree.

In a way, his magazine career had already begun. “I sold subscriptions to Liberty magazine, and Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post,” Mr. Smith recalled. “That’s what many 12-year-olds did in the 1930s to help their families make ends meet.”

But his magazine career began in earnest in June 1948 when he took the train to New York. He and two friends found an apartment on Charles Street and he was taken on as a freelance reviewer for the Book of the Month Club. He also spent time going on dozens of job interviews and revising his resume. Every Saturday night Mr. Smith and his roommates hosted a party for other transplanted Alabamians, including Harper Lee, who would go on to write “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

His first day job was as the assistant to the editor of Charm Magazine, a sister publication to Mademoiselle. During the next six years, via various positions, he learned the magazine publishing business and the people who populated it. He was also able to learn about the social life in Manhattan, which included visits to places like 21 and the Stork Club.

“I definitely had entered a golden era in New York magazine publishing,” said Mr. Smith. “It was the place to be. It was highly desirable as a career. Very difficult to break into it, yes, but when you did it was a warm and inclusive community of bright and talented people, though there was dog-eat-dog competition too.”

The era was about to become more golden. In 1954, Henry Luce and his Time publishing empire began a magazine titled Sports Illustrated. It was looking for the best and the brightest to staff it. Mr. Smith became one of them. According to his book, the new magazine was “dedicated to The New American Leisure, sparked by the changing pattern of work itself, with two-day weekends for all, disposable incomes and lots of time off for play. The research called for a magazine that would appeal to a country club set, aimed at dual audiences, male and female, with a taste for the fun of playing as well as the joy of watching the game, one that advertisers of travel, fashion, food, cars, the good life, would support.”

The concept turned out to be spot on, but not immediately. It took several years for Sports Illustrated to gain traction and earn the place in publishing it has now, but Mr. Luce and his corporation backed it in a way that today’s publishing companies might be reluctant to do. The publisher looked to an earlier huge success as a model.

“When it began in the 1930s, during the Depression, Life Magazine was so successful that it almost destroyed the Luce empire,” Mr. Smith said. “The company could have printed itself out of business. They had sold advertising based on an expected number of copies, and that was greatly exceeded. A decision had to be made to raise the rates before contracts expired or take the hit until contracts were up for renewal and higher rates could be charged. Luce decided to stick to the contracts. And he decided to stick with Sports Illustrated. His gamble paid off.”

Sports Illustrated sent its writers, editors, designers, and photographers around the world to cover events and find stories in remote and exotic locations. As Mr. Smith rose through the ranks there, he always seemed to be getting on or off a plane and meeting some of the most famous international athletes. All this cost money, but these were different days.

“One expense account I had for a five-week trip to Europe was $2,100,” recalled Mr. Smith. “A dollar then is worth $19 now, so I spent almost $40,000 on assignment. Nobody questioned it. If you had a good idea, maybe something no magazine had done before, the response was, ‘Go. Go get that story, go get that photo layout.’ No one ever said, ‘Don’t.’ You were encouraged to be creative and innovative. That is how we kept score, by making readers come back for more and in increasing numbers. There are journalists who claimed they had bought their houses thanks to their expense accounts.”

He continued: “After the Grenoble Olympics in 1968, Dan Jenkins turned in an expense account that was so outrageous that Andre Laguerre, the editor, said, ‘Fred, would you please tell Jenkins to justify this.’ I looked at it and saw rental skis for $500 that he hadn’t been on the whole time, he had stayed in the nicest hotel and his wife was with him, and he had purchased every drink that could be bought for the entire ABC crew as well as himself. When I went to Jenkins to ask him about it, his response was, ‘Do you want me or don’t you?’ The hot writers like him could get away with murder.”

Unlike today, when sports are available for viewing 24/7, there were actually breaks between seasons in the mid-1960s. For Sports Illustrated, that meant readership and advertising flagged, especially in the time between when football ended (without a Super Bowl) and baseball’s spring training began. Mr. Smith’s solution was simple: “Why not grab the third week in January, discover a winter resort in the sun and put a pretty girl on the cover?”

After a couple of tentative attempts, the so-called swimsuit issue was born in 1965. Mr. Smith had hired Jule Campbell from another magazine, and she found a 17-year-old model named Sue Peterson. A Sports Illustrated crew took her to Cabo San Lucas and photographed her in a revealing bathing suit. The shots were published accompanied by an article titled “The Nudity Cult” by another Mr. Smith hire, future gossip writer Liz Smith.

The modest Mr. Smith recounted, “Librarians took it off their shelves. And we received hundreds of letters, mostly gee whizzes and a few ‘How dare yous!’ from overprotective mothers of teenage boys. A jackpot! It ignited the fuse and Jule supplied the fireworks.” And to this day, it is the biggest money-making issue of Sports Illustrated.

By that time, magazines were already vulnerable because of the emergence of a newer medium. “We began to be a little bit concerned when television came along,” Mr. Smith said. “At first, actually, we were okay with it because television had not developed the sophistication to cover sport. And suddenly, it did. The 1960 Olympics at Squaw Valley, exactly 50 years ago, was the first time the Winter Olympics were televised live in America. They took place in America, so the live part wasn’t that difficult, because at most there was a three-hour time difference from coast to coast. It caused excitement and led to skiing growing in America. That was a turning point.

“When Luce wrote his description of what Sports Illustrated was to be, he used the phrase ‘the wide world of sport.’ Some years later, that phrase was used by ABC for its groundbreaking television show. It became the broadcast equivalent of what we were doing with images and text. That was another turning point, and I think we were beginning to look over our shoulder a little bit.”

There was still much excitement to working in magazine publishing, and Mr. Smith continued in the industry in several capacities and for other publications until 10 years ago. By that time, he had purchased a house in Wainscott, and he decided to occupy it full-time and spend a lot less time on planes. He continues to travel for pleasure, which includes visiting his sister and brother, who still live in the South. He was interviewed recently for an NBC special connected to the 45th anniversary of the SI swimsuit issue.

“Whenever I see Christie Brinkley, she says that I made her career,” Mr. Smith said of the model who was on the cover three times.

Now that he has completed “The Road to Wainscott”—a trade paperback available at BookHampton and Amazon.com—he can resume Italian lessons and rereading “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey.” And continue to reminisce about the days when being a magazine editor was one of the best jobs one could have.

“I do miss the work and the social aspects, the people and also the competition,” Mr. Smith said. “I’m very fortunate in that I recognized then, as of course I do now, that it was a special time in publishing. It must be very hard for people today with the internet shutting publications down. For me, it was inhabiting a wonderful world.”