Me & The Times: My wild ride from elevator operator to New York Times editor, columnist, and change agent (1967-97)

An intimate, unvarnished look at the making of the Sunday sections of The New York Times in their pre-internet heyday, back when they shaped the country’s political and cultural conversation. Over 30 years, Robert Stock edited seven of those sections, innovating and troublemaking all the way – getting the paper sued for $1 million, locking horns with legendary editors Abe Rosenthal and Max Frankel, and publishing articles that sent the publisher Punch Sulzberger up the wall.
On one level, his memoir tracks Stock’s amazing career from his elevator job at Bonwit Teller to his accidental entry into journalism to his public relations tours deep inside the aviation and oil industries to his Times years, which included the creation of a pioneering column about issues affecting the elderly.
On another level, this is a book built on stories and anecdotes, comical and deadly serious. Rod Laver challenged Stock to a tennis match. He played a clarinet duet with superstar Richard Stoltzman. A Hopi tribal chairman and a Greek archaeologist introduced him to their lost worlds. He shared a sail with music mogul Ahmet Ertegun, a Mafia-spiced brunch with Jerry Orbach, and an embarrassing moment with Jacqueline Kennedy.
From Stock’s early days as an air raid bicycle messenger in Bridgeport CT... to his seat at the captain's table on the SS France...to his belated sowing of wild oats at age 45…to his stopping the presses at The New York Times...his book offers a fresh perspective on a not-that-long-ago era and industry that were, in so many ways, very different from the now.
Me and The Times should find favor among readers who enjoyed Carl Bernstein’s Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom, and Adam Nagourney’s The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism.

At 19, with a wife and a baby and no job, Bob Stock landed a spot on a weekly newspaper with an assist from Golda Meir's sister. It was the unlikely start of an improbable career of highs and lows, in and out of journalism, that, in 1967, dropped him on the doorstep of The New York Times.

For the next 30 years, Stock served as an award-winning writer and editor at seven different Times Sunday sections including the Magazine, Week in Review, and Business & Financial. He wrote extensively for these sections and other parts of the paper, and created and wrote including a pioneering column about the elderly.

In 1955, after five years as a reporter and editor on the Sunday staff of the Bridgeport CT Post-Telegram, Stock was hired by the Lycoming Division of the Avco corporation as a publicist. Three years later, he moved on to the American Petroleum Institute, where he edited its consumer magazine, Petroleum Today.

After retiring from The Times, Stock became a freelance editor and writer, producing online essays and magazine articles, ghostwriting management books and biographies, co-authoring medical books ((Preventing Hospital Infections and Teaching Inpatient Medicine). He has had two wives and two children and has an abiding interest in sports and classical music. He resides in New York City.