EDITOR'S LETTER

IT WASN'T OUR COVER that got the attention of Time. There's nothing wrong with it, but, at a glance, it looks more like a place mat from the Vermont Country Store - there aren't any cover lines, the logo disappears into the maple leaves, and the photograph could have been made anywhere. Instead, the editors of Time were looking at us in 1951 because we'd been picked up by the Independent News Co. of New York. At the time, it was one of the largest national and international magazine distributors in the country. To that point, we'd been a small mom-and-pop publication with limited circulation. Then, just like that, our magazine was available on newsstands in London, Tokyo and Midtown Manhattan. Our launch into orbit was newsworthy. And Time was impressed.

Their piece, which features our October 1951 issue, is titled People Like Pictures. It's on page 75 of their September 24, 1951, issue, next to an ad for Plover Bond, “a visibly better letterhead paper” from the Whiting-Plover Paper Co.

“This week,” Time wrote, “Editor Raymond Carlson introduced his Arizona Highways to the U.S. at large. For the first time, it blossomed out on newsstands across the nation, and dudes could see what its western readers have long known: that Highways is one of the prettiest byways among American monthlies. In its 36-page October issue, the 30 color plates are of birds, sorghum-growing, and eye-catching photographs of autumn in the Southwest.” Although we'd published a few color photos of fall in the late 1940s, the portfolio in 1951 was our first-ever spotlight on autumn in Arizona. Mr. Carlson was proud. “As tribute to the season,” he wrote, “we are pleased to present some of the most striking autumn studies in color we believe we have ever had in these pages.” The centerpiece is a panorama of the Grand Canyon, looking south from the North Rim. It's wonderful. So is the photograph of aspens by Tad Nichols. It was shot somewhere in the San Francisco Peaks. There's another image from the same area by a man named Bond ... Fred Bond. The other “color plates” feature Navajo National Monument, Mingus Mountain and Sabino Canyon.

Seventy-three years later, our fall portfolio covers a lot of the same ground. There's a lot to cover, because autumn in Arizona unfolds for about four months, beginning on the North Rim in September and ending as late as January in the riparian areas of the Sonoran Desert.

As an editor, it's an easy decision to stuff the October issue with fall leaves. The reds and yellows of the oaks and aspens add a colorful splash to our pages, as if Albert Bierstadt had been flailing his arms in our art department. These portfolios always stand out, but in our world, autumn is more than just eye-catching photographs. Like springtime in the Yukon, it's an antidote to the effects of summer - a psychological resuscitation for a population desperate to come out of hibernation.

“Summer at last is over,” Mr. Carlson wrote in October 1951, “and we welcome relief from the heat. We do not mind the hot weather, if you please, but during September's last staggering days, we think it is about time for a change.” In the desert, it's still hot in September. And it's even more so in August, which is when we go to press with our October issue. As I write these words, it's 105 degrees outside, and I'm pretty sure I do mind the hot weather. Maybe that's because it's warmer now than it was back then. In 1951, at our world headquarters, the average daily temperature in August was 87.8 degrees. Last year, it was 98.8.

Keep in mind, those aren't the average high temperatures. They're an average of the daily high and the daily low, meaning it's not even cooling off at night. So, like islanders in the Lesser Antilles bracing for a hurricane, we board up our windows and hunker down inside, waiting for the heat to loosen its grip. And while we wait, we dream about autumn, when even in the desert it's nice.

But the best place to be is up in the high country. I like the White Mountains. The air over there is crisp and it smells like autumn. Some combination of wood smoke, fall harvest and the ironic redolence of decomposition. “When the leaves fall,” Thoreau said, “the whole earth is a cemetery pleasant to walk in.” For most of us, our dreams about autumn are based on memories. Carving pumpkins, picking apples, canning vegetables, sweatshirts, sweaters, tossing a football, Halloween, scarecrows, Snoopy, Charlie Brown and divebombing mounds of maple leaves, like those on our cover in 1951. That image was made by Fred Ragsdale, and it's titled The Touch of Autumn. There's irony in the name, because the photographer had as much to do with the touch as Mother Nature. “By picking the leaves of a maple tree and arranging them in a handsome pattern,” the caption reads, “the photographer attempted to show the magic touch of autumn. All these leaves were taken from the same tree at the same time. Leaves taken from the north of the tree were more richly colored than leaves from the southern, or protected, part of the tree. A few of the leaves on the protected side had escaped the first frost of the season. They still showed summer's green.” Today, we'd never knowingly accept a manipulated image like that - it violates Leave No Trace and the ethics of landscape photography. But in 1951, no one seemed to notice. Or care. Not even Time.