First CMP Day Elates/Baffles West Coaster

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 Computer Systems News, 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.



CMP Lodging Variety Revealed

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.


CMP: Crowdsourcing Discovers CMP Archives

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, except for this one page.

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.” What would their sixth form history master say if he knew?

It seems Lord Hollick used to light his cigars with back issues, as $100 bills are too crass for the British. They certainly did nothing to save 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 several million words in 20 years, all of them now gone. My work as evanescent as baby’s breath, with the shelf live of fish. If you wrote for CMP, so are yours.