"The Final Condensation"

DeWitt Wallace: 1889-1981

There is no story that cannot be condensed, said DeWitt Wallace, and he spent a lifetime proving it. When he died of pneumonia last week, at the age of 91. Reader's Digest, the magazine he founded in 1922, was the most successful monthly in the world, published in 16 languages with a global circulation of more than 30 million and an estimated readership of 100 million. For him, shorter really was better, and when he was asked what he wanted as an epitaph, he said, briefly: "The final condensation."

Wallace's career might have provided a model for one of his magazine's profiles, which have always favored Horatio Alger sagas of the onward and the upward. His father was a Presbyterian minister who became president of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., where DeWitt was born.

After college at Macalester and the University of California at Berkeley, Wallace began his first venture into what might be called minimal publishing: a booklet that summarized hundreds of free pamphlets for farmers. He was seriously wounded during World War I, but instead of loafing during his four-month convalescence, he sharpened his editor's shears, tightening magazine articles. By 1920 he had prepared a sample copy of the Reader's Digest.

He was willing to give away the idea to any publisher who would hire him as editor, but fortunately for him every one he wrote to turned him down flat. One person who encouraged him was his bride, Lila Bell Acheson, now 91, the sister of a Macalester classmate. "I knew right away that it was a gorgeous idea," she later recalled. They mailed out thousands of subscription appeals just before their wedding. When they returned from their honeymoon to Greenwich Village in Manhattan there were 1,500 responses.

Lila, the optimist of the pah", was thrilled that so many people had answered; Wallace, always the pessimist, was disappointed that so many had not. There were enough positive replies, however, to justify publication in February 1922.

That first issue was typical of all that followed. There was an article called "How to Keep Young Mentally," another titled "Watch Your Dog and Be Wise," and a third on "The Firefly's Light." The magazine tended to be conservative, Republican and antiCommunist, as well as upbeat, inspiring and often simplistic.

Readers loved it. Circulation reached 216,000 in 1929 and passed 1 million in 1934. Imitators tried but failed to match Wallace's formula. Somehow the Digest managed to imply that it contained all the information a reader needed to know.

Wallace refused all advertisements until 1955, when he lifted the ban rather than raise the price of subscriptions. Liquor ads were not accepted until 1979, and cigarette ads are still forbidden; In all he did, his wife, whose father was also a Presbyterian minister, was his support and his prod, and her influence was almost as great as his. In the early days, he was so timid that she often had to go to meetings with him. "Wally is the genius, all right," said a friend, "but Lila unwrapped him." He himself called her his "pillar of strength," and he would often stop to praise "that incredible and wonderful woman." They entertained rarely, and their few guests were usually Digest staffers. When they dined alone, they would, in younger days, dance for 15 minutes after dinner.

Though he continued to keep in touch with the magazine, whose headquarters is a few miles from his estate in Mount Kisco, N.Y., he gave up editorial control in 1965 when he turned 75. He and Lila, who had no children, began giving away many of their uncondensed millions even before that. Macalester, for instance, received more than $10 million; Boscobel, a historic, early 19th century house on the Hudson, another $10 million; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art $5 million 'The dead," he said, "carry with them to he grave in their clutched hands only that which they have given away." It was an appropriate comment from a man whose own publication is second in worldwide distribution only to the Bible.

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