At last, after a year of preparations and frustrations, the first issue of TIME, dated March 3, 1923, was going to press. Soon after midnight, with Briton Hadden in command, almost the entire editorial staff was transported in three taxis from East 40th Street to the Williams Press at 36th Street and Eleventh Avenue, New York. There, until dawn, we stood around the "stones" (tables) of the composing room. Under Hadden's direction we wrote new copy to fill holes, we rewrote to cut and to fit, and everyone tried his hand at captions. It was daylight when I got home and went to sleep. That afternoon, I found an uncut copy of the little magazine in my room. I picked it up and began to turn through its meager 32 pages (including cover). Half an hour later, I woke up to a surprise: what I had been reading wasn't bad at all. In fact, it was quite good. Somehow, it all held together, it made sense, it was interesting.
That description of TIME's birth was the last piece Harry Luce wrote for publication.* And his matter-of-fact summary of what he found in the first issue was what might be said about his own life: it held together, it made sense, it was interesting.
Luce's life was marked by an extraordinary inner consistency. His profound curiosity seems to have been with him from the start. His intellectual style, the way he arrived at ideas and put them into practice—a process often awesome in its intensity—hardly changed over a career that spanned 45 years. Even what he wrote in college rang no note of dissonance with the utterances of his later life. His deeply felt views about religion, country, freedom and society, though they broadened and became more complex, seemed to be present in microcosm during his childhood.
The son of Presbyterian missionaries, the Rev. Henry Winters Luce and Elizabeth Root Luce, he was born and spent the first 14 years of his life in Shantung, the home province of Confucius. From his parents, he absorbed the Calvinist faith and the love of his homeland that were to influence his whole life. Before he was six, he stood on a stool in the mission compound and preached a sermon to the assembled amahs and their children. He later said that he could never remember a time when he did not know all about the U.S. Constitution.
He first saw the U.S. at the age of seven, when his parents came home on furlough. At 15, after several months' wandering around Europe, he returned to attend Hotchkiss. He was one of the most traveled but shiest boys of his age.
Rolling-Eyed Greeks. At Hotchkiss, Luce met Briton Hadden, a fiercely competitive boy from Brooklyn. Hadden became editor of the school paper; Luce (he tried to shake off the nickname "Chink") took charge of the literary magazine. Both excelled in Greek, and Hadden's fondness for such Homeric epithets as "rolling-eyed Greeks" and "far-darting Apollo" prefigured his later introduction of such double adjectives into the young TIME. The two boys did not become close friends until they reached Yale, where Hadden became chairman of the Yale Daily News in his sophomore year, an unusual honor prompted by the call of war for his seniors. Luce joined the News' board. But the war intervened, and both were shipped off to Camp Jackson, S.C. as student officer instructors to the draftees then flooding into the ranks.