Friday, April 24, 1998 | 9:28 a.m.
Spy. Might. Lear's.
How the mighty have fallen. All are names of magazines that have folded up their once proud spines.
In fact, most new magazines barely make it past the first decade, let alone celebrate a centennial birthday.
Even Time, which recently feted itself for enduring 75 years in the business, is a mere babe compared to the small yet proud group of publications that can claim to hold membership in the Century Club: the tony Town & Country, the brainy Harper's, and the arbiter of western civilization -- make that, Western civilization -- Sunset Magazine.
Sunset, which marks its 100th year with a special May issue and a birthday celebration, has survived the 1906 San Francisco earthquake (barely), three changes of hands, and even a stint as a literary magazine.
It recovered from its own faux pas: printing a recipe for a volatile bourbon cake that exploded in readers' ovens, and recommending a mixture for asphalt driveway paving that never hardened.
But still, the sun continued to shine on Sunset -- so to speak.
"It serves readers' needs," explains editor-in-chief Rosalie Muller Wright, the 10th in a relatively short line of editors. "It's talking about all the fun things in life -- travel, garden, home and food. It's a key to enjoyment of all those areas that people live for."
"The Magazine of Western Living" was originally founded in 1898 by the Southern Pacific Railroad as a booster for Western migration. After all, the powerful railroad company had seats to fill and California land to sell.
Today's premise is not so different.
The current publication, with an official circulation of about 1.5 million covering 13 states (Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming) still promotes the best of Western living.
But in an ever-shrinking world where regional attributes have been watered down by retail chains and mass migration, some may wonder whether there still exists a distinct Western mentality and lifestyle.
Absolutely, says Sunset president and publisher Steve Seabolt, who even commissioned a study to prove it.
"There is still a Western mindset," he declares. "Westerners tend to embrace the new. They are exploratory by nature, we like going out and visiting things. Westerners not only believe they can have balance in their lives, they demand it."
Reader traits
Whether you are a reader, of course, depends on who you are as much as where you are.
Are you a 46-year-old female suburbanite (a composite of Sunset's demographics) who agrees with Seabolt that gardening is America's No. 1 pastime? Then you probably find the magazine indispensable.
On the other hand, if you're an urban, hip-hop lovin' male who likes to tinker rather than putter, it's likely you've never heard of it.
But the single most identifiable trait for the Sunset subscriber is that a whopping 93 percent are homeowners. "When people buy their first home," Seabolt explains, "it tends to be the internal trigger that prompts them to get their first subscription."
Or, to have it automatically handed to them: There is actually a program furnishing copies of the magazine to Realtors for them to distribute to their clients.
Others receive the subscription as a gift from relatives.
"It's very common for parents to give Sunset as a gift to their children," Seabolt notes, "or for relatives to buy them when people move from other regions to the West, as a guide on how to enjoy your new region of the world."
Timi Huskinson, a Las Vegas horticulturist and owner of An Octopus's Garden, was surprised with a subscription from her mother about three years ago.
"My mother's had them laying around for years, it's just always been a part of my life," she says. "One time, I made a comment, and they started showing up in my mailbox."
'Nesting' mags
With the success of Martha Stewart Living and last year's relaunch of House & Garden, along with the flood of magazines such as Country Living, Architectural Digest and Better Homes and Gardens, so-called "nesting magazines" have never been so popular.
Sunset has also benefited from this boon -- newsstand sales were up 33 percent last year.
"To put it bluntly," Wright says, "we were here first. Other magazines have come along, but we're bigger than ever, so we're doing something right."
After all these years, of course, the magazine has made some concessions to the changing times, such as newer columns on fast and low-fat cooking, all of which are tested in a "Western laboratory" at its Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters.
Wright sees the trend of focusing on the home as "cyclical."
"There was a period in the '80s where people ate out every night," she says. "Now the pendulum has swung back and people are realizing the joys of being home."
True to its Western sensibilities, the magazine distinguishes itself from its newsstand brethren by avoiding the uptown attitude of publications such as Architectural Digest or House & Garden.
"It's too off-putting," Wright says. "People think, 'I can't obtain that, that makes me mad.' We're more practical, we tell you how to solve a problem."
What also sets Sunset apart from other travel and gardening magazines is its ability to give specialized advice focused on the West, which, Wright says , those "Eastern gardening magazines" can't match.
"It's hard for Eastern editors to understand what we're up against," she says. "They can't be as useful because they don't have the same problems."
To best serve regional differences within the West, Sunset divides its gardening and travel sections into five different zoned editions. (Las Vegas falls into the Southwest edition covering Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and part of Texas.)
"If you like to garden, you need help when you move here," explains Joy Mandekic, a long time subscriber and local gardening expert who helps the magazine check for accuracy. "People are baffled by the heat and the lack of soil."
LV coverage
The magazine's coverage of Las Vegas has seemed somewhat spotty in the past -- perhaps because Nevadans make up less than 2 percent of Sunset's subscribers, or because the city's bright lights seemed incongruous with its homebody image, or gardening tips seemed futile in a desert climate.
"The publisher didn't see the value in desert gardening, so there was a time when there was almost nothing in terms of gardening in Las Vegas," Mandekic says. "There was another change, and now they're really trying to feature the Las Vegas area."
That change can be attributed to the hiring of Wright, who says she has made gardening in arid climates such as Las Vegas a goal. "The urge to garden is universal," she said. "Just because you live in a hostile climate doesn't mean you give up."
And a February article also extolled the city as a living -- not just visiting -- destination. "Suburban Las Vegas is clearly in sync with Sunset," Seabolt explains, "and we're in sync with what's going on there."
And readers such as Timi Huskinson appreciate the attention.
"I can see (Las Vegas) getting covered more and more as the city gets larger," she says. In fact, the April issue featured two mentions of local gardeners in its gardening section: the Amargosa Farms Garden Center and the vegetable garden of Tom and Cindy Kapp.
"It made you feel good that someone actually thought I knew what I was doing," laughs Cindy Kapp, whose beds of raised planters in her 1-acre organic garden intrigued the magazine's editors enough for a write-up.
Never a subscriber before, Kapp says she now makes an effort to flip through the magazine. "Once I started paying attention, it was a good source of info for various things," she says. "So I learned something from them -- and hopefully they learned something from me."
Century mark
The May centennial issue, which was been in the works since Wright came on board two years ago, weighs in at a respectable 258 pages and features a different cover for each zoned edition, illustrating a wilderness area.
With 100 years of back issues, Sunset has the luxury of poring through its archives and choosing to display, oh, say, an article by Jack London or an image by photographer Ansel Adams.
In its list of nods to the "Top 100 Western Contributions," Las Vegas gets the thumbs-up in the travel and food categories for creating a gambling mecca, and for the delectable sweets with liqueur centers made by Ethel M Chocolates.
And at the "Centennial Celebration Weekend," held this weekend at the magazine's headquarters, visitors will make crafts, tour test gardens, attend demonstrations on cooking and gardening and try fly-fishing and virtual hang-gliding.
The magazine will also debut its "Western Dream House," a two-story, 4,000-square-foot Mediterranean-style home, which it calls he house of the future, featuring the Western ideal of merging indoor and outdoor spaces.
And what does Wright predict for the future of the magazine?
"In 25 years, they'll have Time's 100th anniversary, and we'll say, 'Isn't that nice? We're 125.' "
In other words, a future as rosy as a sunset.
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