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.
11 comments:
Drifty, you're great. You brought back my Grandpa Ed, a country boy who came to the big city just before the Big Crash, and drove a pie truck for 40 years. His job and his union boosted him into the middle class, putting his daughter through college and securing him a home and a modest but dignified retirement.
He was also a Readers Digest Condensed Books fan after dark, and would sit out on the porch summers reading those hardcovers. Except for K of C meetings, and his weekly trip to the pool hall for pinochle with his buddies (and a surreptitious beer or two, looked upon sorrowfully but ignored for love by his wife). Went to sleep right quick when he came back on those nights, Adams Clove gum on his breath.
A good man, all in all. Thirty years gone and I still miss him.
Man, I used to get a dollar from my grandparents at the flea market, which I was to use to leverage as many books as possible.
If I missed any Condensed Book volumes from 1947-1967, it wasn't because I couldn't haggle.
As it turned out, when I reached double digits in age and found out what they had, ahem, condensed, I got an education in concision AND sex.
My mother-in-law came from a poor, Southern family. Her grandfather was an Irish paymaster at coal mine in East Tennessee, and her father dragged the family all over the country from job to job.
She married my father-in-law at age 16, days before he lied about his age in order to enlist in WW2. He was trained as a flight engineer and was shot down and taken as a prison of war while bombing oil fields in Romania. He was reported MIA and for months she, pregnant with their first child, didn't know if he was alive or dead.
After the war they had very little money, but she always scraped enough together to buy Readers Digest condensed books. I'm sure her love of those volumes helped shape my husband's lifelong love of reading.
Thanks for the memory.
oops, dropped my apostrophe
Thanks again for your great storytelling wisdom, Dg.
You reminded me of all four of my grandparents who read Reader's Digest condensed books and the magazine almost religiously, and how it littered my childhood refuges.
My story of being disabused of its intellectual content came in my high school sophomore year when one of my friends said "You read Reader's Digest? The worst purveyor of half-assed information that benefits only the military/big dogs? Boy, are you deluded!"
This prolly started my research into magazine/company sponsorship.
Thanks for the heart-warming story reminding me of how my family (including three great-grandparents!) influenced my future intellectual life.
S
Thanks for your great storytelling!! I'd love it so much.
cari duit
Ack! I love Reader's Digest. Curse you, Ripplewood Holdings! :o(
My dad (1896 - 1964)quoted "the Daigest" almost as much as the Bible; some days more. Yes, I miss him.
Thanks for the memories DG
My grandpa really liked Reader's Digest too. He'll be a year gone in November. He got me a gift subscription back in the 1990s that provided me with one of the greatest moments of political satisfaction I have yet derived -- telling the person on the other end of the phone I was cancelling my subscription because of all the horrible right-wing drivel they were publishing.
They didn't used to be quite that bad, reliquary anticommunism notwithstanding, but had really gone downhill in the past 20 years or so. I'm frankly not surprised they got bought out and went under; their market niche has basically been entirely supplanted by Faux News and Women's World Weekly, available at a fraction of the cost...
Incidentally, Drifty, that's the Canadian edition you've used in your P-shop there. :)
we used to make christmas trees out of old issues
http://z.hubpages.com/u/646599_f520.jpg
Ol' Drifty,
My ol' man represented an athletic club after the war and the RD was on the subscription list for bathroom reading. Indeed. RD sent us the 25th anniversary anthology and the 50th, too. I have 'em both. I suppose there's a 75th version out there somewheres, but whodafukcares? The mag became a solid right-wing spokesman somewheres along the line, and subscriptions disappeared accordingly. I am not suggesting there is a correlation here; it's just why I quit subscribing.
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