A mentor to many and a mensch to more, the man Calvin Trillin indelibly (and correctly!) dubbed “the wily and parsimonious Victor S. Navasky,” died last week at the age of 90.
It was only a few months ago editors and alumni of The Nation gathered in person and online to celebrate Victor’s milestone birthday with a fundraiser ostensibly feting the robust internship program he began there, but obviously honoring the man, himself.
Full disclosure: Your blogger was a Nation intern a few decades ago. My first job in New York, it’s where I learned that fact-checking is a thing and that I kinda had a flair for it. (Spend all day asking a lot of questions? Sign me up!) It’s also where I had several brushes with greatness and literary celebs, many of which seemed to swirl around contributor and gadfly Christopher Hitchens.
Nation interns got $75 a week, which was $75 more than most internships paid at the time and the precise amount Trillin, a celebrated, often hilarious chronicler of the Freedom Rides and food trends, earned for each piece of “deadline poetry” published in the magazine. If I walked the 14 blocks from my 3-person, 1-Br share on Mulberry Street, my hair gel might freeze en route, but I’d save $1.50 on subway fare. Stroll down Fifth Avenue to get home, that’s another a daily savings of $3 I could plow back into my deli sandwich lunch.
Sure, the (lack of) pay was unsustainable and reinforced my suspicion that these types of opportunities were meant for the wealthy and/or those who moved back in with parents after college. (Neither situation applied to me.) But the lessons and skills I learned were invaluable. And even though my career has careened and mutated since those heady days of calling the White House to confirm what kind of sandwich Jesse Jackson had during a lunch meeting (tunafish!), I can honestly say that I use what I learned there every day.
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