For more than twenty-five years I worked in a two-story bungalow at 107 North Roberson Street in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. My office was on the second floor, and each time I came down the stairs and reached the bottom, my foot hit a spot on the floorboards where the finish had been worn away. Over and over, people descending those stairs had planted one foot on the hardwood and pivoted to the right, on their way to the front door, their desk, the kitchen. Step, turn, step, turn. How many times did I do this? I don’t know. I do know I worked at that address, The Sun’s office, longer than I have lived in any house.
The Sun purchased 107 North Roberson Street for its office in 1989.
I’m still The Sun’s senior editor, but I’ve been doing my job from home since March 2020, when the staff decided to work remotely because of the pandemic. I went from editing manuscripts on paper and walking them down the hall, to scanning pages with my phone and emailing them, to doing almost everything on-screen and saving to shared folders online. It was an adjustment. But it turned out my coworkers and I didn’t have to spend five days a week in the same location to put out a magazine. As the threat from COVID lessened, we considered returning to seeing each other in person, but for most of us the benefits of working from home—no commute (in my case a two-hour round trip), more flexibility, and more proximity to family, partners, and pets—outweighed the face-to-face contact we’d enjoyed.
Without a full staff coming in every day, activity at 107 North Roberson decreased drastically. Whenever I dropped by to retrieve something, it was eerily quiet. We began to ask: Did we need the house? The building cost no small amount to maintain, and our financial picture, though solid, wasn’t what it once had been. Our revenues had taken a hit from the pandemic economy, the declining effectiveness of direct-mail advertising, and a problem with our website that for months made it difficult if not impossible to sign up for or manage a subscription. Keeping an office where the handwritten editorial-planning calendar in the hall hadn’t been updated since the spring of 2020 seemed like a waste. Funds from the sale of the house would provide a much-needed financial cushion that would help us spread the word about The Sun to new readers. The board of directors agreed: selling was the right thing to do.
The buyer closed on the property in late April of this year. Despite all the logical, practical, convincing reasons for the sale, letting go wasn’t easy. The Sun’s offices had been in that house since 1989, and photos of its well-landscaped exterior had become familiar to subscribers, a couple dozen of whom would stroll up the front walk each year and knock on the door, hoping to get a glimpse of where their favorite magazine was produced and to meet the people who created it. If he was in, our founding editor, Sy Safransky, always welcomed them. And who knows how many less-extroverted readers admired the building from the street? But that house isn’t the only office The Sun has ever had. For most of the magazine’s first fifteen years the publication occupied a much humbler house—since torn down—two blocks away on West Rosemary Street. Before that, Sy produced the early issues in a friend’s garage and then a garret room above a bookstore on Rosemary, also long since demolished. Now it appears the bungalow at 107 North Roberson will soon fall to the bulldozers.
The Sun moved into its office at 412 West Rosemary Street in December 1976. That’s our founding editor, Sy Safransky, at the window.
The Sun currently operates out of a smaller, postwar house next door. We purchased it a while back, as the staff outgrew the main building. It’s where a few of us, including the editor and publisher, Rob Bowers, maintain offices; where we hold planning and manuscript meetings; and where we keep the archive of back issues—the hold-in-your-hands kind, not the digital kind available on our website. The sign has been hung out front. The work goes on. But the old bungalow where I first came to work for The Sun will always hold the majority of my memories, which soon will live only in my head.
A week before the buyer closed on 107, members of the staff—including Sy (now editor emeritus) and Rob—met in the back parking lot to eat pizza, reminisce, and play the beanbag-toss game cornhole. (Our longtime editorial associate and photo editor, Rachel J. Elliott, is an ace at it.) The gathering was cheerful, even though the occasion was not. What would you call it? A reverse housewarming? A wake? We shared a cake to celebrate a birthday and listened to music from a car stereo. Then, as the party broke up, a handful of us decided to walk through the building—to be sure we weren’t leaving anything important behind, and just to be in the space one last time.
Feeling like kids at school after hours, we moved through downstairs rooms illuminated only by the dim light from the windows. Mostly desks remained—too large for the home offices we’d set up in spare bedrooms and corners of dining and living rooms. From a closet (where someone had hidden it?) we pulled a canvas portrait of Rob. All agreed it must be preserved—and perhaps prominently displayed to embarrass him. We removed a few framed magazine covers and flyers from the walls. The house originally had three offices downstairs and three up, but we’d added on to accommodate more staff, and the interior had been divided and subdivided again. I struggled to recall the original layout—especially upstairs, where a hall nook and closets under the rafters had all been converted into workspaces.
At one end of the second story was Sy’s spacious, sunny office. From it I had already taken possession of a chair no one else wanted: a stiff-backed antique that had lived beside his desk in the 1990s and 2000s. I’d sat in that chair almost daily while he and I talked and reviewed edits. The built-in shelves still held many of the books he would peruse to find quotes for Sunbeams. Movers had yet to come for the desk where he read manuscripts, or the couch where he took naps.
More offices lined the hall, including Rachel’s, where we would spread out the photo submissions and decide which images to take—back when we still received darkroom prints instead of JPEGs. At the opposite end was the room most untouched by renovations: my small office. Instead of smooth drywall it had the bumpy original plaster—mostly bare now that I’d removed the family photos and the bright sun-face paintings my two boys had made on paper when they were little. There was my desk, the veneer rubbed almost white, as if all my erasing had removed the wood grain too. There were the windows where the sun’s heat would pour in around two o’clock each day, making me sleepy. There was the wooden desk chair I’d bought at a flea market. One of its wheels was an ill-fitting replacement and would occasionally slip from its socket, suddenly dropping me a few inches to one side. That always woke me up.
Both my sons are men now. When they were small, I marveled at how hard they sometimes fought against change. The developmental steps that seemed so simple and desirable to me were for them tragedies of epic proportions. At some point it occurred to me that each new milestone they reached meant their life would never be the same: No more stroller. No more security blanket. No going back. I should have had more sympathy, I thought, as I took a last look at my cozy office of twenty-five-plus years.
My coworkers seemed wistful, too, but I couldn’t make them stand there forever. We all had lives to get back to. We headed for the stairs.
There’s an old Burt Bacharach and Hal David song about how an empty house isn’t a home. The feeling of home isn’t attached to any building. It travels wherever the people who lived there have gone. The magazine’s staff is more spread out than we once were, but we stay in touch daily and come together regularly. Office or no, we’ll be here publishing a magazine for as long as our readers are out there waiting to get the latest issue. Because, ultimately, it’s not important whether The Sun is produced in a garage, or a garret room, or a two-story house, or the corner of a dining room. What’s important are the contributors who fill its pages, the staff who put it together, the people who read it, and the connections we all make, month after month.
As I reached the bottom of the stairs, I saw that spot on the floor where the finish was worn away. I planted one foot on it. I turned to the right. I kept going.
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