This is about as short as a memo can get, and it is a favorite document in the collection. Written on a Chicago Tribune Inter-Department Memo form, dated October 30, 1974, from Max McCrohon to C. Kirkpatrick. Two lines. That’s it.
Some of the things young Howard Finberg is doing in our graphics area are, I think, very good.
I was in the Tribune’s graphics area at the time, and “young” was accurate. Actually, I was the only graphics person at the paper. Getting noticed by the managing editor mattered, and getting it in writing mattered more — which is presumably why I kept a copy for the next fifty years. It was McCrohon who created the graphics editor job and put me in it.
What strikes me now is how much of a career can start with a sentence like this. Nothing in the memo says what those “things” were. But information graphics at newspapers were still being invented in the mid-1970s, and someone above me was paying attention.