Are there any stories that stand out to you of writers or editors over the years who were real characters?

James Agee always wore the same yellow flannel shirt every day. When TIME was in the Chrysler Building, John S. Martin, who was a cousin of Hadden’s, always kept a rifle in his office and would sometimes shoot birds out the window. One time, a duck that he shot landed on the roof of an adjoining building, and he got one of the office boys to go over and retrieve it for him.

What are your favorite bits of surprising trivia about TIME you’ve learned over the years?

One is the influence that TIME has had on the English language. It coined words like mass market, Tex-Mex, nightclub, homophobia, commute, poster, racketeer, newscast, glitterati, and coffee break.

Another thing that fascinated me was there was a woman who worked for years on the TIME copy desk named Marie Menken Maas. She was an artist and avant-garde filmmaker, married to an English professor at Wagner College. They lived in a penthouse apartment on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights, and they would have these alcohol-fueled salons every weekend, and their guests were frequently Truman Capote and Edward Albee. Albee acknowledged that Marie and her husband were the inspirations for Martha and George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

What are some of your most unexpected finds in the archives?

President John F. Kennedy’s daddy, Joseph Kennedy, was going through his files, and he found a gift subscription card [from when] he had given a subscription to JFK when he was a teenager, and thought Luce would like it. His letter to Luce was wondering if [the magazine] was one of the things that made his son so smart.

One of our correspondents during World War II ended up in Hitler’s headquarters and wrote a letter on Hitler’s stationery, at his typewriter, to the magazine. It was heavy cream-colored stationary with a heavily embossed swastika on it. It was a fascinating, ghastly artifact. But it was fascinating that [TIME] was there.

What are some of the places where you see the influence of TIME in other news coverage today?

TIME invented the newsmagazine. Newsweek was started by Thomas J.C. Martyn, TIME’s first foreign news editor. When TIME briefly re-located to Cleveland, Martin had a family, and Luce wouldn’t pay to move him, so he quit and started Newsweek [in 1933].

Brevity was something that they really focused on in the early days of TIME. It was essentially rewriting primarily New York Times articles thought to be too long and dense, and so they shortened them and punched them up. With news sites now, there’s an emphasis on the economy of language. Get the facts in here, but make your point and make it brief.