Robb Sagendorph | New England’s Gifts

Our editor-in-chief recalls his first morning working for Yankee Magazine’s founder.

During every Fourth of July, my mind turns to Robb Sagendorph, founder of Yankee Magazine, who died 45 years ago, on July 4, 1970, but whose presence I still feel within the pages of every issue, including this one. He was my first boss and mentor—and, oh yes, he was my uncle, too. That long-ago July Fourth was a very sad day, but my most vivid memories of him are happy and wonderful to recall. Take, for instance, my very first morning … “Look at this, Jud,” Robb said as I walked for the first time into the room on the second floor of the red-clapboard building in Dublin, New Hampshire, where I’m still to be found today, 57 years later. He was holding up a small, extremely old almanac. His battered old desk was in one corner of the room. Mine, newer and bigger, was in another, and there were three other people. My presence that first morning increased the Yankee editorial and advertising staff by 20 percent. “It’s an original copy of the 1793 Old Farmer’s Almanac,” he said, carefully leafing through the delicate, brittle pages for me to see. His hands, I noticed, were extraordinarily large, like the rest of him. He wore a bright-red bow tie and red suspenders; the sleeves of his white Brooks Brothers shirt were rolled back to the midway point of his long forearms, and a lighted cigarette was hanging from his mouth. Most noticeable to me, however, were the deeply etched lines on his face. They were placed perfectly, as if by a sculptor. Over subsequent years, people often told me they thought Robb Sagendorph looked like New Hampshire’s Old Man of the Mountain. “Very valuable,” he muttered while continuing to carefully turn over the pages of the 1793 almanac. (Robb had acquired the title from Little, Brown in 1939, four years after starting Yankee.) “Probably fewer than a dozen of these exist, and I have three.” I noticed the ash on his cigarette was becoming long. As time went on over our subsequent 12 years together, I grew familiar enough with him to often cry out, “Robb, your cigarette!” and he’d search for an ashtray, during which time the long ash usually fell off anyway. But on that first morning, meeting him for only the third or fourth time in my life, I couldn’t do that. “Life holds more meaning,” he went on, “when the past ties into the present,” and with that he picked up a copy of the brand-new edition of The Old Farmer’s Almanac lying on his desk and held it up next to the old one. “When that happens, one gains the assurance the present will tie into the future,” he said, looking directly up at me with a smile made somewhat crooked by the continued presence of the cigarette. The smile dislodged not only the long ash but the lighted head as well. I watched in some alarm as it fell directly onto the 1793 almanac and began smoking its way through the first few pages. My expression alerted him to the crisis, and in the next instant we were both galvanized into action, blotting, slapping, and finally blowing away burnt pieces of almanac from his desk. “Perhaps not quite as valuable now, Robb,” I said laughingly, conscious that I had omitted the word “Uncle” for the first time. He laughed, too. My mother and others had warned me that he was stern, serious, imposing, and, as they put it, “difficult.” Yet in less than five minutes I felt close to this complex mountain of a man. It was the beginning of a bond between us that would outlive him by many years.

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He’s been gone for 45 years. But I can vividly picture him perusing this 80th-anniversary edition of his beloved Yankee Magazine, his enduring gift to us all. No doubt he’d have a few details to criticize—he wasn’t always easy to please. But I know he’d be proud. He’d have that smile on his face that I remember so well, and, sure, in my mind there’d be a lighted cigarette dangling from his lips. Some things never change. So thanks, Robb. Thanks and ever thanks.