Monday, Jun. 18, 1984
Of all the departments in TIME, only one has appeared in every issue, unaltered in format, for all 61 years of the magazine's existence. That department is Milestones, essentially the compilation of births, marriages, divorces and deaths that have national or international significance. The first Milestones section, appearing in the March 3, 1923, issue, listed seven deaths. Among them: Thomas Shaw, the last survivor of the 1854 charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War; Mary Logan, who conceived the idea of Memorial Day; and an Indian widow who committed suttee on the funeral pyre of her husband.
Over the years, changes in the column have occurred. There has been a significant drop in the coverage of blue-blooded polo players and yacht skippers; such new categories as arrests, court cases and resignations have been added. The column's length, however, has remained about the same, as have the extreme compression of the form and the sometimes ingenious portmanteau descriptives. Dinah Shore was once referred to as a "scorch singer," Silent Film Comic Harry Langdon as a "deadpantomimer," and Mickey Rooney as a "Hardy family perennial." No longer in use are the TIME-coined neologisms that once peppered the section, such as "socialite," "tennist" (tennis player) and the myriad variations on "cinemactor/tress," such as "cinecomedienne," "cinemoppet" and "cinemingenue."
Always one of the magazine's best-read sections, Milestones has continued to command the attention of both the discerning and the disputatious, who write to question such matters as Nancy Reagan's age (62) and some of the column's descriptions ("squeaky clean" sounded derogatory to fans of Singer Karen Carpenter, and esters protested a reference to Werner Erhard's movement as a "cult").
Over the decades the section has honed the talents of writers who went on to fame, among them Novelist John Hersey and Essayist John McPhee. Recalls Hersey of his first TIME job, which paid $35 a week in 1937-38: "I got to know a lot of famous people, some of whom were dead." McPhee, whose term was 1958-59, still remembers a favorite epithet, "roadside gourmet," in an item on traveling Restaurant Critic Duncan Hines.
Milestones' current crafter is Sara Collins Medina, a staff writer for the past 3 1/2 years. She is assisted by Reporter-Researcher Linda Young. Says Medina: "The process of sifting out an individual's achievements involves assimilating vast amounts of material, then compacting it to the density of poetry. The column also provides the world's most comprehensive education in the creative use of the semicolon."