RSS Feed One of the Nation's Most Honored Weekly Newspapers |
|
|||||||||||||||||
|
Jack Atkinson
There is a magic product called sweetened condensed milk. It is nothing like milk, but it transforms itself into a lemon pie or fudge with little effort. I have had trouble differentiating between condensed milk and evaporated milk. My father was a candy manufacturer and he used both types. I remember the stacks of coupons which came off each can. It is strange what we remember. In his storage room I remember seeing a hand made wooden crate with the word Iraq stenciled on it. It was full of dates which the candy plant ladies stuffed with pecan halves and rolled in sugar. Today we know Iraq from a different perspective. The image of Iraqis packing dates is a lot more pleasant than packing explosives. For the last 55 years we have seen the Reader's Digest Condensed Books. My parents always kept a shelf full of them. They were hard back with nice covers and usually contained four novels edited down to size. When the shelves would fill up, these volumes went to the storage room and more were put on the shelves as they came in quarterly. Actually my parents read these. Instead of buying four books with great difficulty (there were few book stores in the area); these condensed books save $60 to $80. When we closed their home there were tons of condensed books to dispose of. Who wants them? It seems that the best market is decorators who put them on shelves because they look attractive, feign intellectual interests, and even hold a nostalgic touch. In looking over the first decade of Reader's Digest Condensed Books I find some very good writers: William Faulkner, Herman Wouk, James Michener, Winston Churchill, Isak Dinesen, Pearl Buck, Daphne du Maurier, John Steinbeck and Truman Capote. These are still being printed and are now called Reader's Digest Select Editions. DeWitt Wallace was wounded in World War I. He spent months in a hospital recovering during which time he read many American magazines. This Berkeley educated Minnesotan spent the next six months after his return from the war reading and condensing magazine articles at the Minneapolis Public Library. His goal was to create a magazine of abridged articles on a wide variety of topics. He and his wife Lila published the first Reader's Digest from their home in February, 1922. To date over 10 billion have been sold. That is more magazines than McDonald's has hamburgers! There was a method in selecting the articles: they had to contain no cursing, be pro-American and uplifting. The magazine's mission is to inform, entertain and inspire. I know in my household growing up it was a fixture. My father and I would duel over the ever-present section "How to Increase Your Word Power." My mother liked the section "The Most Unforgettable Character I Ever Met." We all enjoyed the cartoons and jokes. During these years the table of contents was printed on the front cover: it was a reading magazine, not the photographs of Life. Both Wallaces lived into their 90's and accumulated great wealth. I first became familiar with them while visiting Colonial Williamsburg where there is the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum. Today their legacy continues through the Wallace Foundation, one of the 40 largest in the nation with a billion and a half dollar asset base. They streamlined articles and the money rolled in. I wonder if that would happen if sermons were streamlined. Just a thought. I know someone whose grandmother gave her $10 each Christmas. She used this to purchase her own subscription to Reader's Digest and she still subscribes and enjoys each edition. I would like to read the novel War and Peace in the condensed version; however some things just cannot be condensed enough.--Jack Atkinson is our regular columnist and a resident of Garfield.
|
for larger version       Ads have a Patent Pending. Click Here for More Information |
||||||||||||||||
