I worked at CMP Publications/Media from April 1979 until March 2001. Employee 100. Four print publications. Three web sites; I was editor-in-chief of two of them. It was not the most fecund period of my professional career in terms of great anecdotes (my two years at AP and UPI yielded more stories), but it was my longest, and generated a lot of great memories and a few essays. If your friends, parents or grandparents worked for CMP, and you’ve always wondered what it was like, here’s a tiny look at the company, starring me.

The story of Tom Cooper granting me permission to Work From Home. Remember flip charts?

My memories of Gerry and Lilo Leeds, the co-founders of CMP.

Sunday, April 15, 1979: Daytime flight from San Francisco. Short drive to the Great Neck Hotel in Manhasset, across the street from the Long Island Railroad station.

Monday April 16, 1979: The LIRR trains provide a (relatively) gentle wakeup call. In Oregon, commercial firms are all open by 9 a.m, so no reason to ask about CMP. After a quick breakfast, just a 45 minute walk to the headquarters on East Shore Road.

Trying to look eager and punctual, arrive at the front door at 9. The building is dark, the doors are locked. I double-check the address; this is the right place. Fortunately, it is a nice day and there are a dozen copies of the Wall Street Journal flung near the entrance. In the time it takes to read one, the first employees arrive promptly at 10 a.m.

After some perfunctory HR paperwork, I am taken to meet Gerry Leeds. He drops what he’s doing and goes downstairs to introduce his son Michael, in whatever department he was working in at the time. “Remember him. He’ll be running this place soon,” Gerry said.

Then off to CSN, where I meet Al Perlman and his merry band, including Jim Alkon. A picture is taken for an upcoming house ad. A two-decade CMP sojourn begins.

Is this item self-indulgent? Yes. And yet, I cannot believe that I am the only newbie who ever showed up before anyone else at either of the East Shore Road offices—especially if they were from the West Coast, where a different sense of time prevailed.

Between 1979 and 1988, while at CSN, ISN and InformationWEEK, I flew from San Francisco to Long Island at least four times a year.

At first, I stayed in the Great Neck Hotel. It was at 75 North Station Plaza, across from the Long Island Railroad Station in Great Neck. Walking the mile to the office took 40 minutes (today, I would for sure drive that distance). The hotel changed hands and became shitified, as the kids say.

By 1983, CMP put its employees up at the Garden City Hotel–much farther away, but much nicer and classier.

When I was younger, I would stay in Manhattan and reverse commute out to CMP in the morning, usually staying a week. By 1988, my trips to New York had become two- and three-day affairs, often beginning with a flight out from San Francisco on the TWA (or Pan Am) red-eye, followed by a quick shower at the CMP gym.

There wasn’t a gym at Manhasset’s 333 East Shore Road quarters, or 111 East Shore Road, so red-eyes required a stop at the hotel. But there was a gym at 600 Community Drive, CMP’s first purpose-built quarters, when the company moved there in the late 1980s, so I could go straight from the airport to work.

If you’ve ever wondered what the editors of InformationWeek were doing on April 5, 1991: IW Staffer Proposes Friday Fun. What did the 1985 conversion of Information Systems News into InformationWEEK  look like from ground zero? The late Larry “Not That Larry King” King described 1984 Manhasset as well as his first-hand experience of the conversion, in his Report from Confusion Central.

I recently noticed that I have been writing titles, not headlines, on my items. A headline contains a verb. Thus the aspirational headline on this item.

I hope someone will prove me wrong. I believe there is not a complete public or private set of any CMP magazine or newspaper.

Lord Hollick and his British and American “managers” were wide awake on a clear day with both hands on the wheel as they drove CMP/UBM into the ground. In civil aviation, the term for this is Controlled Flight Into Terrain.

Apparently, despite their British Public School education, they believed “history is bunk.”[1] It seems Lord Hollick used to light his cigars with back issues, as $100 bills were too crass for the British. They certainly did nothing to preserve any of the archives.

I personally had complete runs of Information Systems News and InformationWEEK. I brought them into the San Francisco office as an historical resource. They were thrown out.

I wrote more than a million words in 20 years, all of them now gone. My work was as evanescent as baby’s breath, with the shelf live of fish. If you wrote for CMP, so was yours.

[1] What would their sixth form history master say if he knew?

If you were at CMP Publications, or just wish you were, you can read some CMP briefs and feel as if you were there.

In my 20 years at CMP I was given a selection of swag that indicated I needed polo shirts and mugs.

The CMP product with the shortest life span gave out the best swag: a coat with leather sleeves. At one time the URL passed to a porn site.

I edited two CMP websites, and got polo shirts for both (not pictured; Byte.com pocket protectors). Byte.com now belongs to a dentist.

And then there were the cups…

The late, great, beneficent media giant CMP (died after being sold for $1 billion) knew its publications and staff were unlikely to receive outside awards (although there were a few), so it gave out internal Excellence Awards, judged by an outsider(s). I won three, still on the wall in my office

So here I am, walking down an alley bathed in the golden glow of nostalgia, hitting my tin pan with a stick. I have written a number of song parodies, but there are two relevant here. Directly about CMP is the story of my time in Cupertino for CSN: Cupertino Star, sung to the tune of Roger Miller’s Kansas City Star. You can tell this one is fiction; CMP would never offer anyone a company car, at least not a journalist.

CMP-adjacent is my account of the freelance experience, King of the Keys, sung to the tune of Miller’s King Of The Road.

Why yes, I have been keeping busy in retirement.

These CMP Links prove that I have written frequently about the company since this blog debuted in October of 1998.

And don’t forget Internet Pioneer (TechWeb) Interviews