We somehow managed to regain our composure.

Lois, who said he still receives advance copies of several major magazines on Sundays (including this one) as a kind of tribute to his influence on the business, still takes the odd cover job here and there. "Nobody knows this, but I am going to be doing a couple of covers for the Harvard alumni magazine, 02138," he said. "They called me up and said, 'Do what you want,' which nobody else would say. I've had every magazine, every magazine in America, for 40 years saying…Time magazine, 'Oh, we want you to do the covers.' But of course when you do, you have to come in and talk to a group of us and then anything edgy gets killed." Since Lois and Hunter Thompson both had such an outsize impact on journalism in the sixties, we asked if the two had known each other. "Yeah, I ran into him five or six times, I never hung out with him. I was a family man." Lois said. "He was a fan of the Esquire covers. I met him and he said, '"Oh my God — we hit a little girl!"' You were the cocksucker, you put that on that cover, right?'" Hello, language. Maybe this guy did know what fisting means…before we could get up the gumption to ask him, he was gone. —Andrew Goldstein