EDITOR'S NOTE
Memories can stick to this

For the past 11 years, a focal point of the Magazine's office decor has been a slender white refrigerator door, circa 1970. The door is unattached to a refrigerator, but that's okay. When the door was delivered one hot summer afternoon, by a friend who worked at the Resource Center (a Hyde Park recycling institution), we weren't looking for a place to store lunches or cold sodas. What we needed was a space to show off some U of C family photos.

The photograph that started our quest was of two graying alumni smiling in some sylvan setting, proudly clad in matching maroon U of C sweatshirts. While we didn't have the space to publish the photo in the Magazine, we couldn't bring ourselves to just throw it out. Like the annual school portrait of a gap-toothed niece or nephew, the image demanded at least a moment in the sun-or on the refrigerator door.

The door, of course, demanded magnets. We started with contributions from our own kitchens. Quickly, a theme emerged: tacky. We took tacky and ran with it. Soon an office custom was born. No one goes away, whether on business or for pleasure, without bringing back a magnetic groaner.

And so the magnets have proliferated. Though they're often ugly or banal, we regard them with affection. No wonder: A 3-D outline of New Mexico-brought back by onetime editorial assistant Michele Thomas, who left the staff for medical school and is now a physician-holds down a Princeton Alumni Weekly clipping. It notes the election of Don M. Randel (Princeton class of '62) to the U of C presidency. The clipping has double meaning for us because PAW's new editor is another former editorial assistant at the Magazine, Jane Chapman Martin, AM'90.

Editors may come and go, but the magnetics have a stick-to-it-ive-ness all their own. Thus, a miniature skillet of plastic paella, brought back by Associate Editor Kimberly Sweet from a trip to Spain this spring, is here, though Kim is not. Kim-who joined the staff in June 1994, fresh out of Northwestern's Medill School, and whose memorable cover stories included an October/97profile of California vintner Chris Howell, AB'75, and June-August/99's "Nice Work," a look at some of the more unusual of the University's job positions-left the Magazine this summer to take a job as an associate content strategist at marchFIRST, an international Internet consulting company headquartered in Chicago. We'll miss the content-strategizing that Kim did for the Magazine's own Web site.

Another magnet, this one a truly tacky plastic snow globe of the Golden Gate Bridge, is the legacy of Associate Editor Charlotte Snow, who also left this summer for the lure of the Internet. She's joined a Chicago-based e-publishing venture, setting up an on-line magazine on bathroom and kitchen design. In her three years with the Magazine, Charlotte demonstrated her unparalleled organizing skills and a nose for the news in her feature writing and in her concept-through-completion work on the "Investigations" and "College Report" departments. She also ran (and improved) the Magazine's intern program for College students.

Meanwhile, the 1999-2000 crop of interns have graduated. Barbara Blank, AB'00, will attend the Law School this fall, while Emily Chang, AB'00, after spending the summer as an intern with the University's Human Rights program, will move to New York City to find a job in the publishing industry. Our new interns are Bora Chang, '01, an English major from New Jersey, and Anne Szustek, '03, of Minneapolis, who's leaning towards linguistics and political science.

Other new names will soon join the masthead, with new magnets added to the refrigerator door.--M.R.Y.