Sometime in late 1970 or early 1971, J. Anthony Lukas took his friend Richard Pollak out for dinner and told him about his experiences covering the “Chicago Seven” conspiracy trial. Lukas had been frustrated by the editors of the New York Times, who wouldn’t let him quote the word “bullshit,” among other limitations on his reporting, resulting in Lukas’s 1970 book The Barnyard Epithet and Other Obscenities.

While in Chicago though, Tony Lukas had met Ron Dorfman and the other editors of the Chicago Journalism Review, and Lukas was impressed with their efforts to document how the press had become too complacent and too cozy with the establishment. At his dinner with Dick Pollak, Lukas said that the two of them needed to start another journalism review, one based in and focused on New York City, the press capital of America (though it would also have some national aspirations). Pollak, Lukas said, should edit it.

The magazine that resulted from this meal was [MORE], a journalism review that lasted from 1971 to 1978 (though Pollak, Lukas, and a third partner, William “Woody” Woodward, III, sold it in 1976).

Before the magazine could get off the ground however, Pollak and Lukas held a meeting at the Harvard Club in New York City. According to Pollak, the turnout at this meeting included frustrated, stifled or disaffected journalists from all over New York City—a much larger group than either of them had imagined existing, let alone attending.

Now, more than 40 years later, I am writing the history of [MORE] for my dissertation at Rutgers University, and I want to talk to anyone who attended that Harvard Club meeting. Were you there? If so, send me an email at kevinmlerner [at] gmail.com. If you have more general memories of [MORE], either in the early days, or throughout its existence, I’d love to hear from you too. My priority right now though is reconstructing as much of this foundational meeting as I can.

Please get in touch if you see this post, and please share this post as widely as you can on social media. Thank you.