HOW DUTCH was the man who came up with Reader’s Digest? His parents christened him William Roy DeWitt, last name Wallace. He was an unusual kid, skipped two grades in elementary school, and developed early on the idea behind Reader’s Digest: condense, shorten, summarize. He started by condensing his own name, William and Roy went overboard. DeWitt Wallace.
Probable reason (everything about DeWitt Wallace was probable because although he was a talented salesman, he was also incredibly shy): William and Roy were his father’s idea. DeWitt came from his mother’s family. Dad and mom Wallace were both pastor’s children, father became a university president, mother suffered from breakdowns. DeWitt felt sorry for his mom and held on to her family line’s name. She was a Morris. That was a name with a British origin, but behind it were some glorious Dutch folks, Staats, Reijnders, Jochems.
DEWITT, THAT was the family from Dordrecht who had also produced the famous politician brothers, Jan and Cornelis. Some relatives emigrated, and now today ten times more DeWitts live in America than in Holland. A proud name, made big in the US by DeWitt Clinton, Marie DeWitt’s son and the man who gave New York and America the Erie Canal. He and Lewis Morris, son of Trijntje Staats, fought side by side for America’s independence.
DeWitt Wallace enlisted to go to war in France during WW I, got injured, and spent four months in a field hospital. He read every magazine that was made available and took notes on how to make stories shorter. After returning to Minnesota, he convalesced an additional six months, sat down in the local library, training himself to condense more stories. Everything could be made shorter and easier to digest, to benefit a wider circle of readers, he figured.
HE PRESENTED his idea to a friend from childhood, a girl who was also a pastor’s kid. Right away, she saw something both in his business model and in DeWitt himself. They got married and became the couple that published Reader’s Digest. They rented a small office in New York, but in reality DeWitt’s office was the New York Public Library, where he feasted on books and magazines, shortening stories everywhere, writing everything by hand. Nobody at the time worried about copyrights. The monthly magazine’s first edition had 1,500 subscribers. Thirty one-page stories, one for every day.
Today, Reader’s Digest has a circulation of 10 million in 70 countries, in 21 languages. By the time Eric Schrier, descendant of the Schriers from Wissekerke in Zeeland, became editor-in-chief in 2000, it had become the world’s best-selling monthly. The Wallaces grew old, she died at 94, he at 93 even though for many years he had been a chainsmoker. Until someone submitted a story about lung cancer to Reader’s Digest, well written, short and to the point, exactly the way DeWitt Wallace liked it. It scared the devil out of him, and he quit smoking from one day to the next, for good.
The couple had no children, and they were fabulously wealthy. They donated it all to charity.
* A portrait of Lila and DeWitt Wallace appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in December 1951. The couple were at the height of their fame. Half a century later, a Time executive, Eric Schrier, of the Schriers from Zeeland, became Reader’s Digest editor in chief.
