• Innovators: The handful of farmers—less than 5% of the total—who took a chance on the new seed in the first few years.
• Early Adopters: A somewhat larger group of farmers, but under 15% of the total, who switched to the hybrid seed in the early to mid-1930s after seeing the success of the Innovators. The Early Adopters were some of the most respected farmers in their communities. They were what sociologists call “opinion leaders.”
• Early and Late Majority: Only after the Early Adopters had success with the corn did the great majority of farmers follow their example; by 1939 more than 90% of the farmers had switched.
• Laggards. The handful of farmers who were the most resistant to change and the last to try the new seeds. (As late as 1941, there still were two farmers who had not switched to the better seeds.)
John Wayne smoked 5 packs of cigarettes a day. (He quit when he got lung cancer.)
FROM CORN TO KIDS
Consumer research firms may use different terms to describe how today’s teenagers respond to new trends, but these modern groupings are surprisingly similar to the ones in Gross and Ryan’s study.
• Edgers. The risk-taking nonconformists of the teenage world, Edgers create their own styles to suit themselves, without caring or often in spite of what other people think. They are like the Innovators in Gross and Ryan’s study: They eagerly try new things.
• Influencers. The attractive, socially confident kids that other teenagers look up to, the Influencers are teenage Early Adopters. They copy Edger styles, and it is their star power that makes out-of-the-mainstream styles socially acceptable and desirable. (Which of course makes them unacceptable to the nonconformist Edgers, who respond by inventing even newer and edgier styles, in a cycle of innovation that never ends.)
• Conformers. About half of all teenagers are considered Conformers, analogous to the Early and Late Majority groups in Gross and Ryan’s study. Conformers don’t have the rebellious, innovative style of the risk-taking Edgers, and they aren’t as popular or as self-confident as the Influencers. But they want to be cool like the Influencers, and they copy Influencer styles in an attempt to be more like them. This makes them a gold mine for companies that market clothing, athletic shoes, and other products to teenagers.
Using surveys and focus groups, or even by sending “spies” into the field to study what the Edgers and the Influencers are up to, consumer research companies try to spot trends as they emerge. They communicate their findings to shoe companies, clothing manufacturers, and other clients, who adjust their offerings in response. With good timing and a little luck, a company that catches a trend as it’s beginning can make a fortune selling cool merchandise to needy, free-spending Conformers who hope to use the goods as leverage to improve their fragile social standing.
• Passives. The Passives are the Laggards of teenage culture. They either don’t know or don’t care what’s cool, so it’s hard to sell things to them. For that reason, they are largely ignored by the marketers and merchants of “cool.”
Ancient nerds: The Romans wore socks with their sandals.
THE FEARLESS WONDERS
How Mohawk “skywalkers” came to build New York’s skyscrapers.
THE FEARLESS WONDERS
In 1886 the Dominion Bridge Company (DBC) of Canada was hired to build a cantilever railroad bridge across the St. Lawrence River near Montreal. The north end of the bridge lay in the village of Lachine; the south end fell on the preserve of a Mohawk band called the Kahnawake. In order to get permission to build the bridge on Indian land, DBC agreed to employ as many Mohawks as possible as laborers. As work progressed, the bridge builders noticed something unusual about the Mohawks: They were fascinated by the bridge. In fact, the company couldn’t keep them off it. They walked all over it, scrambling along the narrow spans hundreds of feet above the river with a grace and agility that wowed DBC’s seasoned riveters, most of whom were former sailors, used to working high above the ground on flimsy ropes. Word quickly spread that the Mohawks had something special—no fear.
DO THE “SHUFFLE UP”
As an experiment, one of the foremen decided to train some of the local boys as riveters. Riveting was the most dangerous job in high steel construction, and good riveters were hard to find. He hired 12 Mohawks, all teenagers, and began teaching them the job. As the foreman recounted later, “Putting riveting tools in their hands was like putting ham with eggs.” The Mohawk teens were naturals—so good, in fact, that they became known as “The Fearless Wonders.” When the bridge was completed, the Fearless Wonders were split into three teams, or “gangs,” and hired to work on another bridge, the Soo, spanning Lake Superior between Ontario and Michigan.
Each Mohawk gang arrived with a young apprentice. As soon as the gang trained the new recruit, another new one would be summoned from the reservation. When there were enough men to create a new gang, the Mohawks had what they called a “shuffle-up”: Old hands were pulled from the existing gangs to buddy up with the new guy, creating a new gang. The demand for Mohawk gangs grew, and by 1907 there were more than 70 skilled Mohawk bridgemen working all across Canada, or, as they called it, “booming out.”
The 1896 Old Farmer’s Almanac gave instructions on kissing. First tip: “Take good aim.”
DISASTER
On August 29, 1907, while building the Quebec Bridge across the St. Lawrence River near Quebec City, 84 bridgemen died when a span collapsed. Thirty-five of the dead were Kahnawake. It was a horrifying blow to the band, and builders feared that the Mohawks would abandon steelwork forever. Instead, young Mohawk men wanted to boom out with the gangs working the high steel. Why? It was the appeal of danger itself. A Mohawk man’s place in his community was determined by the respect he earned for acts of bravery. Traditionally those moments had occurred during hunting or in battle. With those avenues largely taken away from them, young men had no way to prove their manhood. But now Mohawk men were wanted by the world for precisely the thing they valued most: their courage. That’s what really attracted the Mohawks to “skywalking.” The idea that they had no fear of heights was a myth; they were as frightened as anyone else. But by mastering their fear, the Mohawks earned the respect of their community and the entire world. Best of all, they were paid handsomely for their skills. As a white bridgeman observed, “Men who want to do it are rare, and men who can do it are even rarer.”
However, there were changes after the disaster. The Kahnewake women insisted that the gangs no longer work together on one single project. From then on they had to split up to spread the risk of widowhood. The men agreed and went back to work. And the work kept coming, fast and furious. The skywalkers decided to boom out across the border, where the skyscraping phase of American architecture was just getting under way in New York City.
FALLING DOWN
The first attempt by Mohawk bridgemen to work in Manhattan ended in tragedy. John Diabo, known as “Indian Joe” to his Irish coworkers, worked on the Hell Gate Bridge in 1915. He soon formed his own gang with three fellow tribe members. They’d been on a job for only a few weeks when Diabo fell off a scaffold and plummeted hundreds of feet to his death in the East River below. When asked what happened, one of the other Mohawks said tersely, “He got in the way of himself.” The Mohawks quit and went back to the reservation in Canada, and that was it for almost a decade.
Half of the city of Istanbul, Turkey, is below sea level.
CLIMBING BACK UP
By 1926 New York was experiencing a frenzy of steel construction, and high-flying riveters were in hot demand. That’s when a few Kahnewake gangs came down from Canada to work on the George Washington Bridge, followed by more teams to build Rockefeller Center, the Chrysler and Empire State buildings, and every other significant high-rise and bridge. The Mohawk gangs joined the Brooklyn branch of the International Association of Bridge, Structural and Ornamental Steel Workers, and settled their families in the North Gowanus neighborhood. Other Mohawk bands joined the origin
al Kahnawake, and together they created the legend of the fearless Mohawk skywalkers, one that has endured for more than 80 years.
A RIVETING JOB
Skywalkers building a bridge or skyscraper during the heyday of high steel construction (1920–1950) fell into three groups:
• Raising Gangs. Buildings were (and still are) put together like gigantic Erector sets—girders, beams, and columns arrived at the construction site with pre-bored holes labeled with chalk marks indicating where each piece went. The raising gang hoisted the steel piece up to the right spot with a crane, and then attached it to the framework with temporary bolts.
• Fitting-up Gangs. This unit was split into plumbers and bolters. The plumbers worked with guy wires and turnbuckles to align the girders and beams into perfect position. The bolters added extra bolts to secure the piece more firmly.
• Riveting Gangs. These gangs had four workers: a heater, a sticker-in, a bucker-up, and a riveter.
Setting up: The heater was responsible for the small coal-fired stove that heated the rivets. He’d lay a few boards across some beams near the piece to be riveted, set the stove on it, and put the rivets in the stove. While the rivets heated, the other three team members hung a plank scaffold—ropes looped over the beam that was to be worked on, with wooden planks for the men to stand on either side. Then they’d grab their tools and climb onto the scaffold, an unnerving prospect at any height but especially several hundred feet above the ground. There was very little room to move: Any misstep meant almost certain death.
In 1139 the Vatican outlawed the use of crossbows in battle…except against Muslims.
Preparing for the rivet: The sticker-in and bucker-up would get on one side of the beam, the riveter on the other. Once the rivets were red-hot, the heater grabbed one with a pair of metal tongs and tossed it to the sticker-in, who’d catch it in a metal bucket. The bucker-up had already unscrewed one of the temporary bolts, which was about to be replaced with the rivet.
Putting the rivet in place: The sticker-in took the hot rivet out of his bucket with his own set of tongs and slid it into the empty hole (at this point the rivet looked like a mushroom, with a round “buttonhead” and a stem). The sticker-in then stepped out of the way (carefully), and the bucker-up slipped a backing brace called a hold-on over the buttonhead.
Riveting: The stem of the red-hot rivet protruded through the hold-on and out the other side, where the riveter placed the cupped head of a pneumatic hammer against the stem and smashed the almost-molten metal into a matching buttonhead. The team then walked down the scaffold, repeating the process until they ran out of beams. Then they moved the scaffold and repeated the process until every hole was riveted. Every man on the team knew how to do each other’s jobs, and they switched often because the pneumatic hammer was a bone-jarring tool to use. As for the heater, he stayed put, tossing hot rivets with (hopefully) unerring accuracy anywhere in a 30-foot radius from his platform.
Riveting is no longer the preferred method of assembling pieces of structural steel—advances in welding and bolting made those techniques safer and equally effective—so the Mohawk skywalkers simply learned the new skills and stayed at work high over the city. More than 100 Mohawks were aloft at construction sites across lower Manhattan when the World Trade Center came down in 2001. They were among the first rescuers at the scene and worked for months to help clear away the rubble of the great towers they had helped erect.
Most popular colors for cars: 1) white, 2) black, 3) silver, 4) gray, 5) blue, 6) red.
DEFUNCT MAGAZINES
Of the hundreds and hundreds of magazines published, very few rise to the top and become cultural icons. But when they do, they become such a part of our collective consciousness that it’s shocking when they go out of print.
McCALL’S
To promote his sewing patterns, Scottish tailor James McCall founded a four-page fashion journal in 1876. That evolved into a full-scale women’s magazine, featuring articles on health, beauty, travel, and homemaking (and sewing patterns), and underwent a series of name changes, from The Queen of Fashion, to McCall’s Magazine, and finally, in 1897, to McCall’s. Popular throughout the 20th century, McCall’s published high-end fiction by writers such as Willa Cather, John Steinbeck, and Kurt Vonnegut, and from 1949–1962, featured a column written by former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Circulation peaked at 8.4 million in the 1960s, but dropped to 4.2 million by 2000 and was still falling. So that same year, talk show host Rosie O’Donnell was hired as editorial director. (Why O’Donnell? Because fellow talk show host Oprah Winfrey’s O magazine had been one of the biggest new magazines of the 1990s). McCall’s then underwent its final name change, to Rosie, in 2001. By June 2002, sales were down to 3.5 million, less than before O’Donnell arrived; Rosie was one of the least-read homemaking magazines on the market. O’Donnell left the magazine in September 2002 in a widely publicized dispute with publisher Gruner + Jahr over editorial control. But not even the publicity helped the magazine’s falling numbers, and it ceased publication under any name in late 2002.
PHOTOPLAY
One of the first “fan magazines,” Photoplay was founded in 1911 during the infancy of the motion picture industry, and it became the prototype for the “celebrity news” genre dominant today in print (People, Us Weekly) and on TV (TMZ, Entertainment Tonight). Photoplay created celebrity culture by publishing stories not just about movies—then known as “photoplays”—but also about the stars who appeared in them. One of the first issues featured the star of the 1911 silent movie Little Red Riding Hood. Thousands of letters poured in from readers who wanted to know more about the actress, Mary Pickford, who soon became one of the most popular stars of the silent era. It worked the other way, too: In the 1930s, Photoplay dubbed Katharine Hepburn “box office poison” after a string of bombs, and her career took a two-year dip. The magazine awarded an annual Medal of Honor (a gold medal created by Tiffany & Co.) to the movie its readers voted the best film of the year, a concept that inspired the creation of the Academy Awards. Photoplay merged with two other fan magazines—Movie Mirror in 1941 and TV-Radio Mirror in 1977—but by that time it had been supplanted by other gossip/fan magazines. When Photoplay stopped publication in 1980, most of its staff transferred to Us Weekly.
Only 3 U.S. presidents were mayors: Calvin Coolidge (Northampton, MA) Grover Cleveland (Buffalo, NY), and Andrew Johnson (Greeneville, TN).
GEORGE
The conventional speculation was that presidential son and tabloid fixture John F. Kennedy Jr. would eventually go into politics. He didn’t—in 1995 he went into publishing instead. That year, Kennedy founded George, named after George Washington. Kennedy aimed for a literate mix of political topics with humor and celebrity profiles thrown in. (The first cover depicted model Cindy Crawford dressed up as Washington.) Kennedy’s celebrity certainly helped the magazine’s popularity: In 1996 it was the #1 political magazine in the country, but by the time Kennedy died in 1999, circulation had dropped by half, to 400,000. For six months after Kennedy’s death, interest resurfaced and circulation jumped by a third. But the boost was only temporary. Despite contributions from popular political, humor, and fiction writers such as Ann Coulter, Al Franken, and Norman Mailer, without Kennedy’s leadership the magazine flailed and folded in 2001. George’s legacy can be seen today, however. The mix of politics with humor and culture was a precursor to shows like Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.
NATIONAL LAMPOON
Launched in 1970, National Lampoon was a for-profit spinoff of the revered collegiate humor magazine Harvard Lampoon. National Lampoon became popular by presenting cutting, sometimes surreal, parody and satire of cultural institutions, politicians, and celebrities in the Vietnam and Watergate eras. A few examples: a cover illustration of Lt. William Calley, court-martialed for his role in the My Lai massacre, made to look like Mad mascot Alfred E. Neuman; and a cover photo of a dog with a revolver pointed at its head and the capti
on, “If you don’t buy this magazine, we’ll kill this dog.” The magazine was so successful that “National Lampoon” was used as a brand for TV specials, books, a radio show, and films, notably Animal House and Vacation. National Lampoon signed up its one-millionth subscriber in 1974, and circulation remained steady until the end of the decade, but as the counterculture spirit of the ’70s gave way to the optimistic upward mobility and conservatism of the 1980s, readership dropped drastically. The print version was kept alive at a financial loss, as a flagship/brand name to support the other media projects until 1998, when National Lampoon finally folded.
PLAYGIRL
Founded in 1973, Playgirl cashed in on the feminist movement, offering beefcake to women as a response to the cheesecake in men’s magazines such as Playboy. Featuring nude male centerfolds, Playgirl was marketed to heterosexual women, but before long, research indicated that its audience was predominantly gay males. Playgirl, however, refused to alter its content or advertising to reflect that readership. Circulation peaked at about half a million in the late 1990s. As other forms of pornography, both softcore and hardcore, became more available in print and online, Playgirl’s sales softened. The last printed issue appeared in January 2009. But wait! In 2010 it relaunched to a lot of publicity (but poor sales) when it featured a seminude spread of Levi Johnston, the teenage father of Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s grandchild.
MORE HIGH-PROFILE MAGAZINES THAT FOLDED
• Vibe (1993–2009). A major pop-music magazine (surpassed in readership by only Rolling Stone and Spin) that covered hip-hop and R&B music. Owned by Quincy Jones, Vibe spun off a late-night talk show and a televised music awards ceremony. After peaking at 800,000 subscribers in 2007, readership dropped off sharply and the magazine folded in 2009. The brand name was then sold to a private equity firm; they turned Vibe into a pop culture website.
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