The first piece I ever read in The New Yorker was by Rogers E. M. Whitaker, under the rubric “Football,” in the November 22, 1941, issue. I was ten years old. Subscribers called my parents, who were not subscribers: “Johnny is in The New Yorker and they have his name wrong. They call him Mickey.” My father—Harry R. McPhee, M.D.—was called Mickey all his life, and I was called Johnny in 1941, and Johnny only. But the little boy in the piece was definitely me, and the moment I saw it I developed a lifelong affection for the magazine. I was the mascot of Princeton’s football team, my father its doctor. At practices, held a block from my grade school, and at all games in Palmer Stadium and at places like Harvard and Yale, I was on the sidelines, wearing an orange-and-black custom-made football shirt with tiger-striped sleeves and the number 33 on my chest and back.
I would come to know Whitaker as a colleague. We called him Pops. His football columns were signed “J.W.L.,” letters that stood for nothing. He just liked the look of them. His famous pieces about railways and railroad trains were signed “E. M. Frimbo.” His preoccupation with trains was chronicled in hardcover (“All Aboard with E. M. Frimbo: World’s Greatest Railroad Buff”) by Tony Hiss, a New Yorker staff writer who had come along shortly before I did. Whitaker lived in Philadelphia so that he could commute by train every day to the magazine’s offices.
In the nineteen-seventies, across the Hudson River from West Point, I rode the Mt. Beacon Incline Railway with Frimbo, Tony, and Tony’s mother, Priscilla Hiss, the wife of Alger Hiss (try Google). We went up the mountainside fifteen hundred vertical feet without much lateral motion. The locomotive was made by the Otis Elevator Company. Our editor Bob Bingham, who joined us, had arranged the day and a picnic lunch on the summit. ♦
