Marking Time         Fort Jackson was the beginning of TIME               Karen Soule  Public Affairs Officer

Two Yale University students making plans to set the news-reporting business on fire when they graduated in 1920, encountered an interruption along the way: World War I. That interruption, however, provided the spark that would ignite a news organ that would revolutionize modern journalism –– TIME magazine. Henry Luce and Briton Haddon arrived at Camp Jackson in November 1918, officer candidates from Yale, ready to join the 65,000 men preparing to deliver the knockout to a weakened German army in France. To their disgust, they remained at Camp Jackson to train the enlistees who would ship out to fight. But it was while training Soldiers that the idea for TIME was born. Both Luce and Hadden had led sheltered and privileged lives. They met at age 15 as students at Hotchkiss School, a private boarding school in Connecticut. Luce was very shy, the son of Presbyterian missionaries living in China. Hadden was a highly competitive boy from Brooklyn, the son of a wealthy stockbroker. At Hotchkiss, both were involved in school newspapers and this common bond continued into Yale, where Hadden was named chairman of the Yale Daily News in his sophomore year and Luce a part of the news board. Even though they were close friends, they were constantly trying to outdo each other in their journalistic endeavors.   At Camp Jackson, Luce and Hadden met and mingled with common men from across the country for the first time in their lives. It was an exciting time for them, children of privilege who now gained an appreciation for the power and energy of the American people. Equally important, they discovered the huge gap between those who kept up with news and those who did not. That discovery would eventually lead to their joint venture that would provide news and knowledge to a wide variety of people across America.  One hot night, while walking back to their barracks, they continued on through the drill grounds and the piney woods beyond, talking about the paper they might some day found. Luce described the occasion later: “I think it was in that walk that TIME began. On that night there was formed an organization. Two boys decided to work together.” Both Luce and Hadden returned to Yale following the war. After graduation, they went their separate ways before reuniting in 1921 as reporters for the Baltimore News. It was there they started talking about their “paper” again and finally decided to take action. At age 23, they took off for New York with some crude dummy sheets for a news magazine. In March 1923, Luce and Hadden printed TIME Magazine’s first issue. It was mailed to 9,000 subscribers.  Author’s Note: Information provided by www.time.com and “The Man Time Forgot” by Isaiah Wilner.