Vapor Digest #3 The Trade Publication For The Vapor Products Industry
Issue link: http://vapordigest.epubxp.com/i/442928
29 Patrick Butson: Now, you are obviously a lover of printed magazines. Have you ever been featured in a printed magazine before? Samir Husni: Oh, yeah, yeah. I've been featured in plenty. Patrick Butson: Tell me a little bit about how you became Mr. Magazine? Samir Husni: As a very young child, maybe nine, ten-years-old growing up in Tripoli, Lebanon, I bought the very first issue of Superman Magazine and something happened. Even on the way back from the grocery store where I bought the magazine. I just fell in love with the ink on paper. I fell in love with the story telling. I fell in love with the idea of a hero and a villain, and, you know, and something magic happened at that moment and I've never looked back. I went to study journalism, after I graduated from high school. While in college I started working as a journalist covering the civil war, in Lebanon. I was on cloud nine. What journalist does not like to be covering and involved in a war? After the war stopped I got married, and began to finish my degree. One day I got a call from the Dean of the School of Journalism saying, "You have this scholarship to go to America and get a PhD in journalism and then come back and teach. Are you inter- ested?" When I first came to America in 1978, I was like a kid in a candy store. I thought we had a lot of magazines in Lebanon, until I saw what's in America. It was like a dream come true. So, I focused all my education on what makes a magazine succeed, what makes a magazine fail and the rest is history. Patrick Butson: So, what year did you get your PhD? Samir Husni: I finished my PhD from the University of Missouri in December of 1983. Patrick Butson: Did you ever go back to Lebanon or did you bring your wife to the U.S.? Samir Husni: I went back after I finished my Masters in 1980. We went back for a summer. And then we could not go back until 1988, which was, mainly because of the war in Lebanon. By that time, I was continuing my hobby that I started at a very young age, of collecting first editions of magazines. I was carrying every magazine that I could put my hands on with me and moving them around. I moved them from Texas to Missouri and then from Missouri to Mississippi. I have almost 30,000 first editions, volume 1, number 1 magazines. Patrick Butson: 30,000? Samir Husni: Yeah, 30,000, and I have, like, four storage areas that I rent. Just storing those magazines is costing me around $5,000 a year. When I finished my degree, my professor went on sabbatical, and he said the only way he would go on a sabbatical, was if I teach in his place. So he gave me my very first teach- ing job as instructor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. When he came back, I start applying for jobs in the United States. I sent, I think, 65 applications. I received two invitations to go for interviews. I received an invitation from the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and one from the Drake Univer- sity in Des Moines. I went to both interviews, came back home and two weeks later I got a letter from Drake saying, "Sorry." The same thing happened with Alabama. I looked at my wife and said, "You know, no matter how much I know, I don't think I will ever get a job in this country, because one, I'm not an American, and two, it's a trouble for any university to hire me and then to have to go through the process of, getting the labor certification and all that stuff. War or no war, we have to go back to Lebanon." So, I come back home from teaching on campus in Missouri and my wife says, "This guy, Will Norton, has been calling you, like, every time he reached a rest area. And he said he's talking about some job or some- thing." When he called me again and he said, "My name is Will Norton. I am the chair- man of the Journalism Department at the University of Mississippi. We're starting a new magazine program and the folks at Meredith recommended you as a candidate. Are you interested?" They took me to New York and introduced me to everybody in the media business and they actually helped me when I came up with the idea that I want to do a book on, all of the new magazines that started. They said, "We'll print it and send it to everybody in the industry." Within one week, my name became a house- hold name in the magazine industry. The New York Times wrote about the book, so all of a sudden, my name became a household name in the industry. My second year of teaching here, I had a student from Motor Valley, Mississippi. It was so hard for him to pronounce my name, he started calling me 'Mr. Magazine.' At the end of the semester, he gave me a plaque to put on my desk that says 'Samir Husni, Mr. Maga- zine.' I didn't think much about it, but then in 1989, the New York Times did a profile on me and they sent a photographer and the photographer took a picture of me sitting behind my desk, and lo and behold, that desk plate, 'Samir Husni, Mr. Magazine,' was in that picture. Dr. Samir "Mr. Magazine" Husni Interviewed by Patrick V* Butson