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It was at Camp Jackson that the idea for TIME was born. There Hadden and Luce, emerging from the sheltered and privileged enclaves of Hotchkiss and Yale, met the rank and file of America for the first time and discovered the huge gap between those who kept up with events and those who did not. That set them to thinking about getting news and knowledge to a wide variety of people. One night they took a long walk through the drill ground and the piny woods beyond, talking about "the paper" that they might some day found. As Luce later said: "I think it was in that walk that TIME began. On that night there was formed an organization. Two boys decided to work together."
To their disgust, the war ended before either could get into action, and they returned to Yale. Hadden took up again as chairman of the Daily News; Luce became its managing editor as well as a contributor of poetry to the literary magazine. "I came to the conclusion," Luce later said, "that I was never going to be a really good poet, so the hell with it." He and Hadden reorganized the Daily News, then determined to go into newspaper work because of their experience there. The "paper" that they had discussed at Camp Jackson still remained a vague and undefined objective. Luce sailed for England to study history at Oxford; Hadden went to work for the New York World.
A year later, Luce returned from Europe with a mustache, a cane, a pair of spats and two dimes in his pocket. He managed to land a job on the Chicago Daily News as an assistant to Ben Hecht. Hecht was a raffish columnist (and later a playwright) who used Luce as a legman to supply suggestions and information about such people as snake charmers and blind violinists. Among the paper's reporters and editors, Luce was considered something of a dandy and a dilettante. Dressed to meet his girl, he ran into the managing editor in the elevator one day. The M.E. looked him over head to toe, then said with withering scorn: "Ah, Luce, a journalist, I see." Luce later said: "I have sometimes said to myself that the one thing I was determined to do was to make 'journalist' a good word. And today it, is a good word."
What Money Cannot Buy. Luce and Hadden got together again as reporters for the Baltimore News, but their stay did not last long. They began talking again about "the paper" and finally decided to act. Both 23, they took off for New York with some crude, typewritten dummy sheets for a newsmagazine. Setting up shop in an old remodeled house on East 17th Street, they began to write a prospectus. Luce later recalled that going home one night on the subway "my half-glazed stare fell on an advertisement with the headline, TIME TO RETIRE, Or TIME FOR A CHANGE. I remember the name 'Time' occurring to me. It stayed with me overnight, and when I went in next morning, I suggested it to Hadden and he accepted it immediately."