{"id":176632235,"date":"2008-06-01T18:12:15","date_gmt":"2008-06-01T18:12:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/squashword.wpengine.com\/?p=176632235"},"modified":"2015-05-15T18:14:12","modified_gmt":"2015-05-15T18:14:12","slug":"new-yorker-covers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/?p=176632235","title":{"rendered":"New Yorker Covers"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I just got back from my framer three precious things. Since I never want to have a squash court at my house\u2014besides the fact that I am sure I\u2019ll never be able to afford it, I too much like the social side of squash, the random locker-room chatter, the serendiptious gossip that is absent when you have your own court and have to invite over players\u2014these pictures are destined to decorate my already crowded office wall. They are the three squash covers of the\u00a0New Yorker<\/em>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Two were by Constantin Alajalov. Born in Rostov, Russia in 1900, Alajalov emigrated in the early 1920s, first to Persia and then to the U.S. where he soon got work as an illustrator. Constantin (sometimes with an e at the end of his first name) Alajalov did one hundred and sixty-seven covers for the\u00a0New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0from September 1926 to September 1960. He was notably the only artist who did covers for both the\u00a0New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0and the\u00a0Saturday Evening Post<\/em>, the sole exception to the famously iron-clad rule of the country\u2019s two leading magazines. He also did covers for\u00a0Vanity Fair<\/em>,\u00a0Vogue<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Fortune<\/em>, illustrated many books and painted murals for the Sherry-Netherland Hotel and for ocean liners. He was close friends with Odgen Nash, Leonard Bernstein and the Duke of Windsor. Janet Flanner, the famed\u00a0New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0correspondent in Paris, wrote an book with him that collected his cartoons and painting. He died in New York in October 1987, survived by a brother who still lived in Moscow.<\/p>\n

Alajalov was the sports cartoonist for the\u00a0New York Evening Post<\/em>\u00a0in the 1930s, a job that brought him into contact with a relatively obscure sport, squash. In the space of ten months, he twice put a squash player on the cover of the New Yorker.<\/i>\u00a0On 25 May 1935 he depicted six men playing squash, tennis, polo, golf, ping pong and baseball, all trying to swat the same white ball. It is a brilliant, metaphorically-rich painting.<\/p>\n

On 7 March 1936, he drew a squash match. In the foreground is fierce, white-haired man about to smash, with an enormous swing, a backhand into the back wall while his opponent cowers in a corner. It is an awkward scene, with the smasher\u2019s right foot heading toward the front wall and yet his swing shaped for a backhand to the back wall. The only copy I have seen in a squash facility is at the University Club of San Francisco.<\/p>\n

On 7 November 1977 Charles Saxon put squash players back on the\u00a0New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0<\/a>cover for the third and last (so far) time. Saxon, like Alajalov, was another legendary staff cartoonist: in thirty years he did ninety-two covers and seven hundred and twenty-five cartoonists for the magazine (it took three books to collect them all). Born in Brooklyn in 1920, Chuck Saxon grew up the son of English emigrants (his great-uncle Barney had been a court violinist to Queen Victoria).<\/p>\n

Saxon was renowned for puncturing the pompous sensibilities of upper-class East Coast America, and his portrait of a woman waiting to get on a squash court filled with two men perfectly captured the wildly-changing 1970s New York City squash scene. It was rumored that Saxon drew the picture at an old squash tennis court at the Yale Club (he went to Columbia, class of 1940 and the Columbia Club of New York is based at the Yale Club).<\/p>\n

Saxon, like most squash players, went down swinging. He was sardonic, right up to the day in December 1988 when he had a heart attack in his home in New Canaan. In the process of falling down when his heart seized, he knocked down a lamp. He seemed to be pretty sure he was dying, and when the EMTs were taking him out on a stretcher, he said, \u201cI guess I\u2019d better die\u2014I just broke our best lamp.\u201d<\/p>\n

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 1st, 2008 at 10:15 am and is filed under\u00a0General<\/a>. You can follow any responses to this entry through the\u00a0RSS 2.0<\/a>\u00a0feed. You can\u00a0leave a response<\/a>, or\u00a0trackback<\/a>\u00a0from your own site.<\/small><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

3 Responses to \u201cNew Yorker Covers\u201d<\/h3>\n
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  1. Kathy Mintz<\/cite>\u00a0Says:
    \n    June 9th, 2008 at 9:40 am<\/a><\/small>Great post! I have a color xerox of the March 7, 1936 cover hanging in my living room, courtesy of a friend who used to work at the New Yorker and made a copy for me. I think you can order prints of the covers from the link you sent, too. Didn\u2019t realize that there were two other instances of squash players depicted, too.
    \nAlso, just visited my alma mater, Wesleyan, which built a great new set of squash courts just a couple of years ago. They\u2019re named after Robert (Bob) Rosenbaum, my former math professor, who\u2019s still playing squash at 90 with a twinkle in his eye.
    \ncheers, Kathy<\/li>\n
  2. Guy Cipriano<\/a><\/cite>\u00a0Says:
    \n    June 17th, 2008 at 10:15 am<\/a><\/small>Jim- great post! I had seen the cover of the people at the Yale Club checking their watches- extremely well done! It was definitely of the old Yale Club courts- they were the only ones that had that kind of door and railing combined. That is absolutely true. Many years ago there actually was a stand-alone Columbia Club on 43rd St. in NYC. It was on the south side of the street, close to 5th Ave. They had two courts I think. I played there before they closed. That must have been in the late 70\u2019s I think. The rumor was that the Reverend Sun Yung Moon\u2019s people bought the bldg. IT\u2019s still there but I\u201dve never seen anybody going in or out . I wonder if Moonies play squash. Sure hope so! GUY CIPRIANO<\/li>\n
  3. Mark Alger<\/a><\/cite>\u00a0Says:
    \n    July 16th, 2008 at 12:41 pm<\/a><\/small>Hi Jim,
    \nI enjoy reading your posts. Those are great covers, and they would look great on my wall here too. Regarding having to invite players to play at your own court, I agree it\u2019s a bit tedious, especially when your prospects would have to travel all the way to beautiful Alaska! But worth every penny! (for the court, and opponent\u2019s travel) Hope you can arrange a trip up here. Bring your bat.
    \nMark<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I just got back from my framer three precious things. Since I never want to have a squash court at my house\u2014besides the fact that I am sure I\u2019ll never be able to afford it, I too much like the social side of squash, the random locker-room chatter, the serendiptious gossip that is absent when … Continue reading New Yorker Covers<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-176632235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176632235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=176632235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176632235\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=176632235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=176632235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=176632235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}