He Made Things Happen

Roy Larsen, 1899-1979

A year out of Harvard and bored with his job in the credit department of the New York Trust Co., Roy Larsen heard that two Yalemen, Briton Hadden and Henry Luce, were about to launch a new weekly magazine. A friend in publishing encouraged Larsen to apply for a job, but warned that Luce and Hadden were "awfully strong-minded fellows. Can you take it? They had another fellow who couldn't."

Larsen signed on as circulation manager of the Luce-Hadden brainchild:

"TIME, The Weekly News-Magazine." His salary was $40 a week. On the first day of publication in February 1923, Larsen wrote with euphoria and some apprehension to his father: "I am really afraid to go on record as saying TIME has arrived, but the newsboys swear it has and it's their bread and butter." Larsen hired three debutante friends to help him mail the first issues; with amiable incompetence they sent three copies of the magazine to some subscribers and none to many others. For a time there was no desk space for Larsen in the magazine's Manhattan office, so he worked out of the library of the Harvard Club.

But Larsen eventually found a congenial home at Time Inc. He stayed for 56 years, until his retirement last spring as vice chairman. After Briton Hadden died of a blood infection in 1929, Larsen became Luce's right hand in all matters of business. He was LIFE'S first publisher, the godfather of the radio and film March of Time series and the longest tenured president of Time Inc. (1939 to 1960). With the exceptions only of Luce and Hadden, Roy Edward Larsen, who died last week at 80, was the person most responsible for the destiny of Tune Inc.

Larsen was a gracious, inquisitive and gentle man who accommodated himself to Luce's abrupt and sometimes difficult style. Said Time Inc. Chairman Andrew Heiskell: "Roy fitted himself to Luce's personality and complemented it totally."

Larsen was an enthusiast, with a superb improvisational talent, what he called "the amateur spirit." He defined it as the "sense of wonder, adventure and fun" that animated TIME from the start. He was endlessly accessible--the unphoniest man I ever met," recalls PEOPLE Magazine Publisher Richard Durrell. He liked and admired those who came to work for TIME; he treated them to an abundance of his intelligent attention and personal warmth. He was also an exceptionally alert recruiter of new talent. Remembers Heiskell: "He was terribly proud of bringing up people, making them into something." Among his discoveries were James Agee, who became TIME'S film critic, and Sloan Wilson, who worked as Larsen's assistant and modeled his best-selling 1955 novel, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, partly on his boss. Says Wilson: "Roy had energy, courtesy, selfdiscipline. When most people were running on twelve volts, he was running on 440 volts. Asking him for a raise was like stabbing a billiard ball, but he had class. When I showed him my novel and asked if he wanted any changes, he said, 'Say anything you want to about me except that I asked a good writer to change a good book.' "

In the beginning, one of Larsen's tasks for TIME involved coaxing $5 subscription fees from readers who had taken the first three issues as a no-money-down free trial. "I burned the midnight oil writing letters cajoling them into paying," Larsen remembered. The experience helped him to become a genius of the new genre of direct-mail magazine solicitation.

By 1929 TIME'S circulation had climbed to 250,000, and Larsen and Luce were deep in preparation for another magazine, FORTUNE. They decided to proceed with the new venture, an expensive monthly devoted to business, even after the Crash. In a 1929 communique, they declared: "We will go ahead and publish, but we shall be realistic. We shall recognize that this slump may last as long as one year."

If the magazines were primarily Luce's province, The March of Time belonged to Larsen. In 1928 he produced a series of radio spots distilling news items from the current issue of TIME. The idea developed into The March of Time, an amalgam of journalism and showmanship that lasted until 1951. The program was first broadcast nationwide on CBS radio and then converted to film by Larsen in collaboration with Louis de Rochemont of Fox Movietone News (it won two Oscars in its 16 years).

With the birth of LIFE in 1936, Larsen returned to magazines. For ten years he presided over the picture weekly's extraordinary success. In 1938, when the magazine published explicit photographs of childbirth. Larsen went to the office of a Bronx assistant district attorney and ceremoniously sold a copy to a detective; the D.A. charged Larsen with selling an obscene publication. The incident brought national publicity to LIFE and a test case involving the First Amendment's free-press guarantee. Larsen was acquitted.

The years of Larsen's presidency at Time Inc. were marked by steady growth. Among other projects, he guided the launching of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED in 1954. Larsen and Luce once thought of making 45 the mandatory retirement age at the firm, but settled on the customary 65. Larsen became the only executive to be exempt from that rule (Luce retired from active management upon turning 66, three years before his death in 1967). In later years Larsen became a source of thoughtful counsel and new ideas. He kept himself avidly well informed. Says TIME-LIFE Films President Bruce Paisner: "His mind didn't have a lot of preconceptions in it."

The son of a newspaperman, Larsen was born in Boston in 1899. He attended public schools there and went on to tax-supported Boston Latin School. The experience gave him a lifelong interest in public education and, he once said, "a sense of gratitude for what the American public school system did for me ... [It] translated into reality the American ideal of equality and opportunity."

In addition to his duties at TIME, he organized the National Citizens Commission for the Public Schools to arouse local interest in school reform. His connection to Harvard was always close and active. He served two terms on the university's board of overseers. In 1965 Harvard honored him by naming a new Graduate School of Education building after him. "Roy Larsen has to be ranked among the greatest friends of American education." the school's dean, Paul Ylvisaker, said last spring.

Larsen's other civic passion was conservation. He donated 162 acres near his house in Fairfield, Conn., to the Audubon Society for a bird sanctuary, which the society named for him and his wife Margaret. He served on the board of the Nature Conservancy, which acquires and manages wild lands throughout the U.S., and he organized the Nantucket Conservation Foundation, a group that solicits donations of open land on Nantucket Island to keep it out of the hands of developers. The organization is a typical Larsen success. It now controls 17% of the island--and through the acquisition of productive cranberry bogs, it even turned a profit last year.

Ultimately, says former Time Inc. President and Publisher James A. Linen,"Roy Larsen realized the world was made up of people, not things. He was softspoken, charming and underneath a man of great moral and intellectual courage and conviction." Henry Luce's sister, Elisabeth Moore, added a valedictory assessment: "Harry was the genius, but Roy was the one who could make things happen."

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