Ampersand

Ampersand was a new magazine about the occult, the paranormal, and New Age subjects whose short run became the starting point of a young reporter’s career. Launched only a few months before he joined, it was still struggling to get off the ground; despite its precarious beginnings, it offered him paid work and two years of assignments that brought him into contact with the city’s unconventional subcultures.

Launch and Editorial Direction

The narrator first encountered Ampersand in a repairman’s magazine, a forty-eight-page glossy publication. Its third page listed the editorial staff and identified the publisher as a company run by John L. Friedman. The magazine’s subject matter did not initially appeal to the aspiring reporter, who had little interest in the occult, paranormal phenomena, or New Age ideas.

Friedman, by contrast, saw a readership for the niche. He did not believe in ghosts or care much about paranormal subjects himself, but considered the magazine commercially viable, especially among baby boomers. Its editorial office was described as a disorderly enterprise: the editor-in-chief was characterized as slightly deranged, and the office was filled with eccentric people who, in the narrator’s estimation, could not write well. The magazine had been operating for only a couple of months and had yet to find its footing.

A First Job in the Occult Press

After visiting Friedman, the narrator found that they liked one another. Friedman offered him a salary considerably higher than he had expected, and he accepted immediately. His first published story was about the furniture restorer whose chance visit had helped lead him to the magazine, a job he felt he owed the man for in some measure.

The narrator worked for Ampersand for about two years. The assignments took him to voodoo séances in Inwood and haunted houses in East Harlem, introducing him to people and practices far removed from his initial interests. The magazine also brought a steady stream of correspondence: some readers struck him as alarmingly unstable, while priests wrote to warn that his work was leading him toward hell. These encounters show the kind of material the publication attracted and the varied reactions it provoked.

Closure and Aftermath

Friedman eventually decided to close Ampersand. Rather than ending the narrator’s reporting career, the closure became a transition: Friedman helped him secure a reporter’s job at the New York Post. The magazine’s brief life thus had a lasting consequence for the narrator, furnishing his first published work and experience in journalism before he moved on to a mainstream newspaper.