Between the Covers

July 9, 2026 by DickH Posted in Uncategorized Leave a Comment

Between the Covers

By Leo Racicot

The Golden Age of magazines was still going strong when I was a kid. Popular publications like LIFE and LOOK Magazines still held their popularity with readers. As someone who’d been weaned from a young age on movies and movie-going, thanks to my father’s love of them, I especially liked LIFE; It was larger than most magazines of the time , had an almost cinematic quality. Its size was cinematic. Some of its subject matter and themes were lustrous, high-quality photos of movie sets, movie stars. It took a grand, larger-than -life approach to the movers and shakers of the day: presidents, presidential candidates, world leaders, even bringing depictions of so-called ordinary life into the living room: Midwestern farmers, New England Shaker communities, cotton growers of The Deep South. Readers need never leave their homes in order to see the world, Or, were inspired to visit the places and peoples they saw in these two magazines (LOOK offered the same vistas only on perhaps a smaller scale: LOOK was LIFE’s kid sister). National Geographic was also themed along these same lines and how many young folks of that time were made aware of the people and cultures of exotic places (Africa, Alaska, TheSoviet Union, The Far East) through the pages of this still-popular publication? I still love browsing through vintage copies of National Geographic, and if I’m at Savers or Brattle Book Shop, I head instantly to the used magazine racks to look for National Geographics to be had for mere pennies. National Geographic fed my imagination, opened me up to a world I didn’t know and probably would never see in-the-flesh. One particular article that has stayed with me all these years is a 1968 issue heralding the around-the-world solo journey of Robin Lee Graham, a young man of 16, who dared to take his sailboat, The Dove, from California and back, on a three-year circumnavigation. National Geographic followed him in what became a series of articles chronicling Robin’s entire trip through to his safe return home in 1970. On the way, he visited such places as Hawaii, Samoa, Fiji, The Hebrides, The Solomons, South Africa and Australia. It was great fun and truly exciting following him on his sea odyssey and even now, if I spy one of those issues, I scoop it up, even though I already have it. The romance of his brave, intrepid adventures still has the power to move me.

As a boy scout, I really looked forward every month to Boys’ Life, the official magazine of the Boy Scouts. Its blend of fiction, non-fiction, articles on scouting and character development, its highlighting of popular science fiction writers of the day like Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov (I was fascinated hearing that Asimov had written over 500 books!), stories of seafaring and safari adventures and of the wonders of just plain being a boy captured me.

I liked Boys’ Life almost as much as I liked the comic books of the day. I thrilled to the adventures of Batman and Robin (Batman remains my favorite superhero) Also popular in those days was the Archie Gang: Archie, his best pal, Jughead, their on-again, off-again girlfriends, Betty and Veronica, cohorts Reggie Mantle and Moose Mason, evil Madame Satan (whom Anthony said had to be an ex-nun). I followed faithfully for years the Riverdale kids and their antics for years. And wasn’t it a hoot finding a beloved old back issues down at Harvey’s Bookland on Central Street? I especially enjoyed scouring the ads found at the back of most comic books: ads for X-Ray glasses (so you could see like Superman), Joy Buzzers (You placed these in the palm of your hand and walked up to an unsuspecting victim to “shake hands”. Joe liked the Charles Atlas ads in hopes that one of the muscle-building products could bulk him up and I put in an order for the live sea-monkeys which, predictably, arrived dead.

One of the things I liked best about going to see the doctor or the dentist was the wealth of fun magazines to be thumbed through in the waiting room: being a Catholic grade school student and being “a good little Catholic boy” — ahem –I liked finding the many Bible stories oriented magazines there — anything to take my mind off the dentist’s drill or Dr. Brady who used to shoot a fizzy medicine in my ear, calling it “ginger ale”. I had terrible, chronic ear aches throughout my childhood and I remember the day Dr. Brady surveyed the latest and told my mother, “If Leo has any more of these, he’ll be deaf”. Miraculously, I never had another earache.

But I digress — who me?? DIgress??

In the late ’70s and ’80s, when I was first submitting essays for publication, it was magazines that bought my work: First Hand, Spiritual Life, Faith and Inspiration. Il loved the editorship of now legendary publishers and editors, Art Kleiner & Stewart Brand, both of Coevolution Quarterly and WInston Leyland over at Gay Sunshine Journal. These mags weren’t Time or Newsweek but it was a thrill seeing in print what I’d written.

To this day, I love the sight of a library’s magazine racks. Even if I don’t read them all (who could??), I like the look of them on their shelves, When I worked at O’Leary Library, I’d spent most of my break in the Periodicals Department thumbing through as many as I could. I like magazines almost as much as I like books, possibly for their visual enticements, their highway into a world I wouldn’t otherwise be able to see….

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