David W. Dunlap is a Metro reporter and writes the Building Blocks column. He has worked at The Times for 40 years.
Tehran. Cradle of Islamic revolution. Crucible of anti-American hatred.
And birthplace of the international edition of The New York Times.
It was June 1943, the middle of World War II. Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the publisher, and his assistant, James Reston (who went on to a distinguished career of his own), flew into Tehran from Habbaniyah, Iraq, aboard a Boeing 307 Stratoliner that had been pressed into service by the Army Transport Command.
They were there to meet Maj. Gen. Donald H. Connolly at the Persian Gulf Service Command Headquarters. His soldiers were engaged in supplying Allied troops, one of the “least glamorous tasks in the whole global war,” Turner Catledge of The Times wrote. “These are the men who are shoving the goods to Russia along the rail and motor route from Persian Gulf ports.”
General Connolly faced a crisis in morale.
Most of his men were doing the same kind of work (and for a lot less money) that they did back home, running railroads, driving trucks and repairing machinery, Mr. Catledge reported. They had to cope with temperatures that ranged at least 120 degrees, between desert floors and mountain passes. They were isolated in their posts. “And most onerous of all, perhaps, were the monotony and the lack of obvious connection with combat,” Mr. Catledge wrote.
Mr. Sulzberger had been studying morale issues in the armed forces for two years. He proposed a solution. It turned out, he said, that Camp Lee, in Virginia, possessed strong morale because its commanding officer, a former newspaperman, made it a priority to keep the troops informed. “The enlisted personnel at Camp Lee understood they were in uniform because Axis madmen had set out to overrun the world,” Meyer Berger wrote in “The Story of The New York Times.”
The Times, Mr. Sulzberger told General Connolly, would, at its own expense, furnish an eight-page tabloid to the armed forces, called Overseas Weekly. It would essentially be a pint-sized version of what was then known as The News of the Week in Review section of The Times.
However, the publisher said, there was a fly in the ointment. A very big fly. Army Special Services jumped on the proposal at first, but suddenly balked, fearing that other newspapers would be infuriated if The New York Times was the sole designated supplier of news to the troops.
An aide to General Connolly more or less whispered in his ear: Sir, you could requisition The Times from the Army Exchange Service as a commodity — just like toothpaste — to be carried at the PX.
A deal was struck. Page forms known as matrices, or mats, were cast in plastic at The Times’s headquarters on West 43rd Street in Manhattan, then flown to Iran. They weighed six ounces. Army bookkeepers could not accept a commodity at no cost, so The Times charged $7.20, the raw cost of the plates.
Though dated Aug. 22, when the pages closed in New York, the first copy of Overseas Weekly (PDF) did not hit the post exchange
in Teheran until Sept. 9.
Despite what seems now like an impossibly long lag time, Overseas Weekly spread rapidly. By the end of the war in 1945, it was being printed at 16 sites. Later that year, it could even be obtained in Japan (where it was printed at Asahi Shimbun) and Germany (where it was printed at Frankfurter Zeitung). It was everywhere except areas under Soviet control.
No fools, Times business executives realized they’d created a large new audience. So they continued publishing Overseas Weekly until June 19, 1949, when it was supplanted by The New York Times International Air Edition.
This time, for a birthplace, the editors chose Paris.