Take A Wild Guess

How the most popular, All-American, straight-arrow, fresh-copy-on-grandma's-coffee-table-every-week magazine in the history of the world drove itself into bankruptcy?

Whet Moser has the whole story here at "The Chicago Reader" here. (Hint: The reason was not humorous or in uniform, but it did absolutely symbolize Life in These United States.)

My grandfather was one of those Depression-era heroes that we could sure use more of right now. A church-going, hillbilly Liberal who charged into the working world with a rudimentary education, who was competent at every-damn-thing he turned his hand to, and who he kept a roof over his family's head during the worst economic crisis in American history by going where the work took him -- from dam-building to munitions plants -- even if that meant crisscrossing the continent in pre-interstate America.

And through faith, family, and years of hard work on his union jobs, my Liberal hillbilly granddad bootstrapped himself into the American Middle Class.

I have his clock on my mantle, some pictures, and the straight-razor and strop he carrier with him wherever he went, but my greatest inheritance from him -- handed down to me through my mom -- was his voracious love of reading. And some of my most vivid memories of him always feature a Reader's Digest Condensed something-or-other open next to his bed, or on the table, or lovingly displayed on book shelves he probably built himself.

I suppose, in my mind, the Reader's Digest was one of those things that was supposed last forever: a small but indispensable rung on the American ladder up which decent, industrious people like my grandfather could ascend to a life of relative security and comfort.

Of course nothing lasts forever, but I find the fact that it met its fate so cheaply, ignobly and predictably -- leveraged to death and sold off to make a few greedy, short-sighted people incrementally more wealthy, just like so many other middle class American institutions -- terribly sad.