The following is a transcript of remarks from Tyler Mathisen that he delivered during a memorial service for past OPC Presisent Marshall Loeb at Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan on Jan. 18, 2018. His remarks are posted here with his Mathisen’s permission.
Read more about the memorial service here >>
Read remembrances from past OPC presidents and other members here >>
By Tyler Mathisen
Good afternoon, or as Marshall might have said with a jaunty wave, “Good Day!”
My name is Tyler, and like many of you, I am a recovering Marshallette. 30 years in recovery now.
Who are the Marshallettes? We are that long and happily devoted line of men and women – often exceedingly exhausted men and women – led on a joyous journalistic parade by the Grand Marshall himself.
How do you know if you were a Marshallette? Here are the signs. You arrived at work at 8. Marshall was already there. You got home at two, in the morning. And you woke up the next day at 630 a.m. to WCBS Radio with Marshall saying, “I’m Marshall Loeb with Your Dollars.”
Your immediate thought when this happened, as it did on more than one occasion to Money’s Rich Eisenberg, was “I can’t get away from him!” And we’re glad we couldn’t.
Can we all agree that Marshall was, and is, fundamentally indescribable?
He had to be experienced. And once experienced, he was in the best of all possible ways impossible to forget.
Like all of you, I am terribly grateful that I knew Marshall Loeb, worked for him, learned from him and, above all, experienced him. Truly, I owe my career to him.
But let me tell you what I am even more grateful for. I am even more grateful that I worked for Marshall Loeb before there were cellphones.
The idea of working for Marshall, weaponized, with a hand-held device that he could use to reach me, or text me, any time of the day or night, anywhere in the world he was or I was, sends shivers through my body.
Marshall did love being in touch, being connected. He loved learning and reporting and knowing. But beyond that, he loved “engagement.” Marshall was engaged and wanted you to be too.
That was his gift, and sometimes our burden.
One of his successors at MONEY, Frank Lalli, who served as Marshall’s deputy for four years, tells how you could set your watch on what he calls the “Sunday afternoon hour-long.” It was one of many manifestations of his thirst for engagement.
Frank describes it this way: Marshall would ring and always say, “Got a minute?” And Frank would say, “Sure Marshall.” And Marshall would follow with, “Good, good.” And off he’d go like a speed talking Energizer Bunny. A couple of years into the ritual, Frank fantasized about answering “Got a minute?” with … “Actually Marshall, my house is on fire. My dog is biting the mail man. And my wife just ran off with the plumber.” But Frank knew Marshall would still say: “Good, good, and off he’d go….”
I met Marshall 36 years ago. He brought me here from Virginia to write for him at MONEY. I was very green. And I sure didn’t know what I was in for.
Another of my mentors, the Time Editor Champ Clark, schooled me. Champ said to me, “I’m delighted. You will really like Marshall.” And then he said: “He will work you very hard, but he will always work harder than you. And he is very generous.”
Champ was totally right. I have never known anyone who worked harder, and I bet neither have you. There was sacrifice in the work, of course, lots of missed dinners and late nights. But there was joy too – the joy of engagement.
What you may know less about is his generosity. Marshall was generous with Time Inc’s money, if you earned it. But he was also generous with his own cash, even if he didn’t need to be.
Diane Harris, another of Marshall’s successors as Money’s Managing Editor, recalls Marshall used to share a portion of the advances he got for his series of annual “Money Guides.” These books were his edited, and sometimes expanded, compilations of stories that had run in the magazine. If your work appeared in the book, you got a check – a personal check – from Marshall.
Diane said … he’d call each one into his office individually to hand out the checks. She said “It was a lovely personal gesture, very time-consuming” considering the number of people he rewarded.
He paid me personally to write his “Your Dollars” CBS radio scripts for him. Based on what I do now, and what I learned from him about writing for the spoken word, I should have paid him.
Marshall was not merely generous with money. If you needed help with a story, Marshall was there. If you needed defending, maybe because you’d written something that ticked off an advertiser, he was your guy.
A few months into my tenure at Money, he assigned me an economic forecast story of some sort. I didn’t know where to begin. I had no sources whatsoever. So he called me to his office and said, “Call Alan.” I said “Alan who?”
“Alan Greenspan. Tell him I told you to call.” Not every journalist shares their best sources. Marshall did.
Even I knew who Greenspan was. I was intimidated but I summoned my courage and called him. We spoke for about 45 minutes. I didn’t understand anything he told me. The clearer he tries to be, the more confusing he gets. But I’ll tell you this: I damned sure quoted him in the story.
I spoke to Alan Greenspan last week about Marshall. He remembered him fondly, especially from his days on the TIME Board of Economists.
The TIME Board wasn’t easy to pull off, Greenspan said to me, but Marshall “assembled the most eloquent, informed intellectuals you could gather in economics. It was all Marshall’s creation, and it was one of the best uses of my time.”
I went on to observe that I thought one of the dumbest things Time Inc ever did – among many — was to force Marshall to step down from Fortune at age 65. Greenspan agreed. He said: “I’m approaching 92 and I feel I’m just entering my prime.”
In a pinch, Marshall was there for you. Yet another of Marshall’s successors at Money, Lanny Jones, tells how Marshall swooped in to save the day when Lanny was serving as acting M.E. while Marshall was at magazine development.
Apparently MONEY had run a skeptical story about some exotic investment vehicle whose name, Lanny says, he has “totally suppressed.” The Wall Street purveyors were outraged and demanded a meeting.
“Marshall had nothing to do with this story,” Lanny recalls. But they both went to the meeting – Lanny says his knees were knocking. The short of it, Lanny says, was that Marshall defended MONEY and completely awed and cowed the Wall Street guys with his knowledge, confidence and eloquence. They raised the white flag. And the two left with their heads held high.
How did Marshall do all this? How did a kid from the west side of Chicago, not exactly poor but very far from rich, rise to the pinnacle of American journalism. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Johnson, Reagan, Clinton: he met or interviewed them all. Ditto Thatcher and Gorbachev, Gates and Buffett, Welch and Walton and IBM’s Watson.
How did he write all those cover stories, columns, books, radio scripts; how did he re-write magazine stories in the middle of the night with such craft and elegance; how did he see into the digital future and become the on-screen face of TurboTax and Quicken?
More amazingly, how did he re-invent whole magazines, not once but twice, turning them from profit-challenged into profit machines, from earnest reads into award-winning must-reads?
The answer is simple. For one thing, had more than a little of Alexander Hamilton in him, working and writing like he was running out of time.
For another, he was a magazine genius. And a very stable genius at that!
What Marshall understood about magazines wasn’t so much about magazines as it was about readers. He understood readers loved to read about people. So he put real people on the covers of MONEY, and he made FORTUNE less about management and more about the fascinating people who ran the world’s great companies. At FORTUNE he turned CEOs into celebrities. At MONEY he made ordinary small investors into people we could relate to and learn from.
He believed in journalism. He believed in the truth and in telling it. He believed in Time Inc and its mission, and in the separation of church and state. He loved his family and set a high standard for his children as he did for me and so many of you.
He worked with the best, so many of whom are here today, and he brought out the best in everyone he worked with. You wanted to do your best for Marshall.
Marshall made a difference, not just in the lives of the many people here to honor him today but in American journalism.
He invented a kind of journalism where the writer spoke to the reader person-to-person, conversationally, never talking down, always eye-to-eye. He spoke to readers in a tone that hadn’t been used in magazines before. He gave MONEY its voice – that distinctly Marshallian second-person voice — and FORTUNE a compelling new identity.
He engaged. He was full of enterprise. He innovated. He had bandwidth before bandwidth was even a word. He was the first, and the ultimate, multi-platform journalist.
Marshall was indescribable. He had to be experienced and, once experienced, he was unforgettable. He was “The Grand Marshall.”