I’m a big fan of the corner of 50th & 6thin New York City. You got Radio City Music Hall to the northeast, 30 Rock to the southeast, and the famous Christmas Balls Fountain to the southwest. But the northwest corner is my favorite this week. That’s the site of the Time & Life building.
The Time & Life building was constructed in 1958 to house the headquarters of Time, Inc., which had recently merged with Life Magazine and would soon be producing the country’s most famous magazines. During the decade of the 1960s, Time, Inc. offered countless options to the American reader, including Time, Life, People, Sports Illustrated, and Fortune. The 1960s, the greatest decade of economic growth in American history, were a pretty good time to be an executive at the Time & Life building.
So much so, that cable television made a series out of it.
The cable TV show Mad Men is set at the Time & Life building. The show tells the story of the advertising culture of the 1960s, with all of its ups (post war prosperity and professional success) and downs (toxic misogyny and poor public health). Mad Men takes place over the decade of the 1960s, ending when the main characters find some semblance of peace after 10 chaotic years on the 37th floor of the Time & Life Building. The final scene of the last episode shows executive Don Draper (Jon Hamm) finding solace on a 1970 California beach while (perhaps) conjuring up the most iconic Coca Cola advertisement of the 1970s. Mad Men was a popular show.
And it will now always remind me of an Austin College Kangaroo.
Texas native Clifford Grum graduated from Austin College in 1956. At the encouragement of his economics professor Dr. Clyde Hall, Grum applied for and was accepted to the Wharton School of Business at Penn. That degree led to an East Texas career at Temple-Inland, the timber company which produces paper. Magazines need paper as much as readers, so Time, Inc. purchased Temple-Inland in 1973 and took Grum in as an executive. Over the next 10 years, Grum’s home was New York City. He was the publisher of Fortune and later the Senior Executive Vice President over all of the company’s profitable magazine divisions. Grum’s 34th floor office (just 3 floors below the fictitious Sterling, Cooper, Draper, & Price of Mad Men) was in the Time & Life building.
Just like the show’s 10-year run from 1960 to 1970, Grum’s 10-year tenure was a time of change. Grum’s arrival in 1973 coincided with a fortunate Time, Inc. acquisition. Time purchased an obscure local company that had recently laid cable in and around Manhattan in order to sell America on a new idea: uncensored television free of commercials, for a modest monthly fee. Customers would be able to flee network TV with its restricted content and annoying Mad Men advertisements. Grum and his colleagues were excited about the idea and the company, but insisted on a name change. That company, which would usher in the cable era, was renamed Home Box Office. Turns out, a Roo executive for Time in the 1970s was present at the creation of “Time Warner Cable.”
From the October 3, 1980 edition of the New York Daily News:
“Reporting to [Time CEO] J. Richard Munro [is] Texan Clifford Grum, who will be executive vice president overseeing the company’s five group vice presidents. Thanks largely to Munro, the hot property on Sixth Avenue is not magazines, or even forest products, but the not-so-genteel world of video: cable television and Home Box Office. ‘When we got into cable it was not quite as competitive,’ Munro said in an interview yesterday in his handsome wood-paneled office on the 34th floor of the Time & Life building. ‘Our timing was fortuitous.’”
By 1983, the game had changed completely at the Time & Life building. Magazines as a primary source of revenue had been replaced by cable television, so Grum’s expertise in East Texas paper and Fortune Magazine publishing were no longer the assets they had been 10 years earlier. Grum found solace, however, by leaving New York and returning to his East Texas roots in the timber & paper business. There, he was active in the Presbyterian church and a member of the Board of Trustees at his alma mater. He gave generously to AC while (ironically) insisting that the “Fortune” of giving attached to his name not be “publicized.”
The Time & Life building saw declining interest after Grum’s departure. But the show Mad Men returned the spotlight to the corner of 50th & 6th. The show’s iconic introduction features a silhouette of Draper falling alongside the building, and numerous Mad Men scenes were shot both around and inside the building. After the series concluded, a public bench with Draper’s silhouette was installed outside Time & Life. Principal cast members, including Elizabeth Moss, John Slattery, Christina Hendricks, and Jon Hamm were on hand to dedicate it. That same weekend, the street corner at Time & Life was briefly changed from 50th & 6thto Don Draper Way & Mad Men Ave.
Grum passed in 2016 as Mad Men, the show on a cable TV platform Grum had championed during his days at Time & Life, wrapped up production. Grum’s wife Mary passed in 2022 after funding the Wynne Chapel renovation in the name of her husband. The Roo giving from the Grum family continues, however, despite the end of the lives of this former AC power couple. This week, the estate announced the largest gift in the history of Austin College: $20 million dollars to fund full tuition scholarships. The gift was timed to coincide with the 175thanniversary of AC’s founding, to be celebrated in 2024.
In 1988, Marc picked Luckett Hall as his AC dorm of choice. Why? Well, for one, Luckett at the time was the only dorm with Clifford Grum-approved cable TV! That memory, combined with the selflessness of the Grum family towards AC, is something that will motivate me to write. The largest gift in the history of Austin College? That’s big “Mad”ison Avenue news. And the type of generosity that will get you a Marc / Mad Men Roo Tale. A big thank you to Grum family, and a golf clap to Dr. Clyde Hall for sending our Roo Don Draper on a path to the Time & Life building, located on the corner of 50th & 6th.
https://archive.nytimes.com/cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/mad-men-city-time-life-building
https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2015/03/23/mad-men-bench-unveiled-in-manhattan/70333790/