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In 1958, the Hula Hoop craze was sweeping the nation, gas cost just 25 cents a gallon and the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants were playing baseball on the West Coast for the first time. That same year, an eagle made a surprise landing on The Times editorial page.

Making a Landing

The page had been a sea of gray text for the previous 107 years, but on June 4, without announcement, a round eagle emblem appeared on the upper left-hand corner of the page, next to the masthead.

It wasn’t just any old eagle, but rather one inspired by a wooden eagle statue. Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger saw the statue in a London antiques shop a year earlier and was immediately mesmerized. The eagle was striking – hand carved of pine, more than four feet tall, wings wide open, head turned, at the ready. “It is a little difficult to tell exactly why the bird so quickly captured my imagination, but it did,” he said.

The wooden eagle statue that inspired a logo and legacy.

A symbol of strength, authority and freedom.

The publisher bought the statue and shipped it to The Times headquarters, where it caught the eye of the editorial page editor. The two men decided to find a home for the eagle in the paper. An image of the eagle was fashioned into a round emblem with The Times slogan, “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” and the year the paper was founded, 1851.

The eagle makes its Times debut June 4, 1958.

“I think it may have been that with folded wings it suggested both peace and strength.”

– Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Times publisher 1935–1961

The eagle remained on the editorial page for 14 years, until March 15, 1972, when the page was redesigned. Though out of the limelight, the eagle logo showed up on Times dining room plates, atop a beloved throw pillow for the publisher’s wife, Iphigene, and in employee gifts such as paperweights, totes and cufflinks.

Today, the eagle statue is in storage, awaiting a comeback at an in-house Times museum. The eagle emblem has been reproduced in exacting detail on Times Store products, whose sales support our newsroom’s pursuit of independent high-quality journalism. The products are made by local vendors who took a page from our journalists, focusing on details, quality and integrity to get everything right. Sixty years later, the eagle’s legacy lives on.

The Eagle and The Times

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