The New Yorker:

The writer and his great subject—Ahmet Ertegun, the head of Atlantic Records—shared a deeply American restlessness.

By Ian Frazier

George William Swift Trow, Jr.,’s family called him Swift. The name fit his quickness of wit and spirit, and his grace. His friends, of whom I was one, called him George, pronounced in a descending tone as if in reference to his firmly grounded authority on subjects important to the rest of us, or not. The Trows had been in New York City for generations. When I came from Ohio, in 1974, I knew nothing about the city and had no connection to it except as a destination for ambition. In the nineteenth century, an ancestor of George’s had published what was known as “Trow’s Guide,” an early directory of the city’s residents and their addresses. Another ancestor had been on the Hudson River, in 1804, when Alexander Hamilton was being rowed back to Manhattan after his duel with Aaron Burr. George’s ancestor looked at the boat through a telescope and said, “My God, they’ve shot Alex Hamilton!” It’s not an exaggeration to say that all my visceral knowledge of old New York derives from that sentence, and from the way George said it (spoken, it doesn’t have a comma), and from other things George told me. I wasn’t a New Yorker, and George made me one.

He became a staff writer for this magazine in 1966, after Harvard, where he had been president of the Lampoon, and after a year in the Coast Guard. At The New Yorker, he first wrote Talk of the Town stories, which were unsigned back then. He loved R. & B. music and liked rock and roll mostly as Black music’s epigone. His first signed piece was about a promoter who went around to disk jockeys and tried to persuade them to play certain records on the air.

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