Alice McGaughey: 1925-2002. (in memoriam).

Alice liked to anticipate the worst. After almost every one of African Arts' white-knuckled descents on the financial rollercoaster, she would tell me with a grim sigh, "Time to clean out our desks." Somehow, however, disaster would be averted; our ride car would nose upward. In 1988, after twenty years with the journal, Alice performed that final ritual of office housekeeping. She had always steeled herself for economic collapse, but in the end her decision to retire was based on the prospect of other, and, in her clear-eyed view, insurmountable, challenges.

In those days it was mainly the two of us in the production office. I edited manuscripts, as I do now. So did Alice. Her title was Art Director, but almost no one knew that she also handled every other aspect of the journal: circulation, accounting, advertising, negotiations with printers and other vendors. She stuffed envelopes. She ordered typewriter ribbon. She made almost every editorial and financial decision except for those in which John Povey, then the sole UCLA editor but also a full-time professor, wished to be involved. If John was the theatrical face of the magazine, Alice was the one-woman stage crew. In the 1940s, during her student years at UCLA, she'd worked on productions at Royce Hall. It suited her to be behind the scenes, where she could be a part of the artistic excitement but bask happily out of the spotlight.

I imagine Alice arriving for her first day at the office in 1968--wearing one of the shirtwaist dresses and the sensible shoes that constituted her uniform during all the years I worked with her--and finding a handful of professors looking down in helpless astonishment at the squalling African Arts baby they had managed to sire during that fertile cultural era. Like Mary Poppins, she took charge. Not the pert movie Mary Poppins, but the original P. J. Travers governess: brisk, efficient, devoted. As many an academic who brought in treasured field photos for assessment can tell you, the medicine Alice dispensed was not accompanied by a spoonful of sugar: "Your pictures are bad, unfortunately, so we'll use only what we have to." She preferred castor oil.

By the time I began working at African Arts, Alice had developed the gloomy world view of someone who had done long and weary battle with entrenched bureaucrats and slackers. I can almost see her, the cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth (three packs a day before she quit cold turkey) as she'd mutter darkly about the trouble caused by "some dame in Accounting who can't add" or the impending routine visit from "the Post Office goon squad" regarding our second-class mailing permit. The latter inevitably consisted of a lone bored civil servant who would desultorily thumb through our files for a few minutes before declaring everything in order and asking for directions to the nearest campus snack bar.

Alice's sharp wit and blunt pronouncements could be intimidating, but if you didn't put on airs and weren't a fool, she was fiercely loyal and endlessly forgiving. Of course, it wasn't always clear what constituted a fool in the Alice lexicon, so you lived in fear of being discovered to be one. The burden of proof was particularly heavy for academics, as they tended to cause trouble of all kinds without being a bit sorry. They would, for instance, sneak out of the country without delivering a promised article, throwing our work on an issue into disarray. Alice's revenge against those who had established a record of childish irresponsibility was the Deadbeat List, her roll of dishonor, expertly calligraphed and hung prominently on the wall. ("There," she'd say as she added the last elegant flourish to a name, "that'll show 'em.") People were known to poke their heads into the office and hastily scan the list before daring to venture in.

To Alice it seemed that many of our art historian contributors were willfully ignorant when it came to field photography. They chose to believe, she complained, that taking pictures was easy. They were blind to the fact that they had sliced feet or tops of heads out of the frame, they were rhapsodic over images that were severely under- or overexposed, and they exhorted the reader to note the refined details of sculptures they had captured on film as shadowy blobs or that indeed seemed to be missing from the shot altogether. When Doran Ross and Skip Cole offered to guest edit a special issue called "Photography in Africa" (August 1985), Alice was enthusiastic: finally, an opportunity to set camera-challenged academics straight! She waited impatiently for Doran and Skip to supply the column of practical advice for the edification of their less talented and less disciplined colleagues. This was apparently not one of their priorities, however, and in the end she pounded it out herself on her favorite IBM Selectric II typewriter. Here's Alice, in an excerpt from her directive:

   THIS MEANS YOU ... If you already have cameras, learn to use them. Get
   acquainted with proper loading procedure. Practice being sure the film is
   engaged on the winder. Practice removing the lens cap. If there is a
   built-in strobe, practice changing the batteries. Practice cleaning the
   lens. BUYING A MORE EXPENSIVE CAMERA IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR PRACTICE.

Back then, the magazine always came out on time. Alice, who had once worked in New York for Fortune and other Time Inc. publications, saw to that. She accepted no excuses for late submissions, leaving would-be contributors running after the moving train, futilely waving their half-finished first drafts and good intentions as their ticket to ride. She applied the same rule of unyielding practicality to herself. An issue might knowingly be sent to the press with flaws that wounded her artistic pride, but solutions take time, and in Alice's unselfish professional view, better flawed than late.

But the biggest reason for the magazine's punctuality was simple: Alice worked overtime, without compensation, without complaint, without acknowledgment by those outside our door. Her days at the office were twelve hours long, and she came in on weekends, sometimes both Saturday and Sunday. One morning I arrived to find Alice particularly out of sorts. My inquiry was waved off with a vague explanation about her day starting badly. Eventually she told me how she had squinted at her bedside clock that morning and had seen that she'd have to rush if she was to get to the office and finish the Times crossword puzzle before daybreak, as was her routine. Annoyingly, the paper wasn't on her doorstep--late again!--but she decided not to wait and set off for work, driving as usual through the deserted intersections whose lights were set to blink yellow until the rest of Los Angeles began to wake up. At the office, she made herself a cup of coffee and glanced at the clock. It was 2:45 A.M. "Teach me to get out of bed without putting on my glasses first," she growled. That was one of the few days Alice went home before I did.

Alice was uncomfortable with overt expressions of sentiment, especially those directed at her. But a tribute to this remarkable woman is long overdue, from me as a colleague and friend and as a spokesperson for the journal. Alice taught me how to edit. She showed me how to prune roses. She made me look at things in new ways. She made me laugh. As for African Arts, without its Mary Poppins, the baby would have died or been put up for adoption.

When Alice cleaned out her desk in 1988, she left behind the paste-up boards, the rubber cement, the Letraset type. Their days, she saw, were numbered too. There had already been talk of computers. Alice liked rodents (her daughter had had a pet rat), but not the kind you click. She wanted no part of hardware and software, RAM and ROM. The jargon depressed her. I suspect that she also knew Alzheimer's was waiting at the end of her rollercoaster ride, and she wanted to get off early, while she could still walk to the exit.

Once Alice and I took the Red Eye to New York to conduct some African Arts business. The city then was reeling from a perception of unlive- and unloveability but was fighting back with a massive PR campaign. We arrived on a glorious winter morning--brilliant blue sky, an exhilarating nip in the air. Manhattan sparkled, and so did Alice, as she pointed out landmarks and reminisced about her days at Fortune. At Rockefeller Center, someone, pegging us immediately as out-of-towners, offered us I [love] NY buttons. Alice hesitated, then gave me an "Oh, why not" grin. She wore her button all day.

AMY E. FUTA is Executive Editor of African Arts.