The Press: The Common Touch

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dropped out of college and went back to St. Paul, where his father got him a job writing promotion circulars for a farm-book publisher. DeWitt soon quit and got up a book of his own (a guide to all the free pamphlets on farming, briefly "digesting" the subjects of each). He hitchhiked through the West trying to sell it to banks and department stores. He barely broke even, but it started him thinking about a digest of business articles for businessmen. One night, after working in a Montana hayfield, he was trying to sleep in a bunkhouse when the great idea came to him. Why not "a general digest of the best magazine articles?"

Before he could do much about his great idea World War I began. Wallace enlisted, and fought in France as a sergeant in the 35th Division. In the Verdun offensive in 1918, he was hit by four pieces of shrapnel (one piece worked out of his nose only last year), and spent four months in the hospital. While he was convalescing, he tried his hand at condensing magazine articles and found that it was easy.

Back in St. Paul, he spent six months in the public library, reading magazines, some of them ten years old, condensing and copying articles by hand. In January 1920, he printed up "31 articles of enduring value and interest" in 200 copies of a pocket-sized sample magazine. He called it the Reader's Digest. He mailed copies to a dozen Manhattan publishers and others he hoped might back the magazine. Luckily for him, all of them turned it down. Wallace says he undoubtedly would have "given it away" to anybody who would have made him editor.

He had another bit of luck. In St. Paul, he ran across his old friend Barclay Acheson, now a Presbyterian minister, and learned that Lila Bell had not married after all. During the war she began doing morale and recreation work for women factory workers, and was still doing it. Elated, Wallace sent her a telegram: CONDITIONS AMONG WOMEN WORKERS IN ST. PAUL GHASTLY STOP URGE, IMMEDIATE INVESTIGATION. A week later, as luck would have it, Lila was temporarily assigned to St. Paul, and Wallace saw her again for the first time in eight years. On the first night, Wallace proposed to her; on the second, she accepted; then he bashfully showed her a copy of the Digest. "I knew right away," she recalls, "that it was a gorgeous idea." But they had no money to start the Digest or marriage. Lila went back to her welfare work in New York, and Wallace to Pittsburgh to write promotion copy for Westinghouse. Not long after, Wallace was fired.

It was now or never. With $4,000 borrowed from his father and brothers, Wallace mailed out thousands of subscription appeals for the Reader's Digest, "The Little Magazine." Then he rejoined Lila, and in the tree-grown suburb of Pleasantville, N.Y., 31 miles north of Times Square, they were married by Barclay Acheson. They rented a Greenwich Village apartment, took time out for a two-week honeymoon in the Poconos. When they returned they found 1,500 letters, each with $3 enclosed. Says Lila: "I was enthralled that so many had answered. He was disappointed because everybody hadn't."

Under the Speakeasy. The first issue was no problem. Wallace had a lot of articles ready, in his 1920 sample ("Useful Points in Judging People," "The Firefly's Light," "Is the Stage