The Press: Parents’ New Child

“There are magazines exclusively devoted to the raising of cattle, dogs and flowers, but none to the most important work in the world—raising children.” With this observation, in 1926, a 30-year-old Manhattan bachelor launched Children—the Magazine for Parents. For his monthly, Publisher George J. Hecht,who combed the birth statistics for his mailing list, set a circulation of 100,000 as his wildest dream. It soon came true—and then some.

Last week Publisher Hecht, now 54, and the father of two teen-age children himself, sent a proud notice to his advertisers: Parents (the name of the magazine since 1929) was boosting its circulation guarantee another 50,000, to 1,250,000. Hecht, who now publishes five other successful magazines, also sent a new journalistic offspring out into the world. He put on sale 200,000 copies of The Children’s Digest, a gay-colored pocket-sized monthly that was a frank imitation of the Reader’s Digest. Children’s Digest will reprint the best stories, comics and other features from children’s magazines and books.

The green-tinted pages (“easier on the eyes”) of the first issue were crammed with puzzles, games (“Make Your Own Secret Code”), color comics (“The Story of America” by Historian David S. Muzzey) and reprints of such children’s classics as Kipling’s How the Camel Got His Hump and Stevenson’s Escape at Bedtime. Like everything sober-minded George Hecht has published, it looked like a nice mixture of his zeal for child welfare—and profits.

First Taste. Hecht got his first taste of publishing as manager of the Cornell Era in 1917, whetted his appetite during World War I by a stint under Propaganda Boss George Creel. At war’s end, while doing settlement-house work in his spare time, Hecht founded Better Times (still the official organ of the New York Welfare Council) and got the idea for a magazine to help parents give their children better care and training.

To get the money to start it, Hecht formed Parents Institute Inc., and got a $325,000 grant from the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Memorial Fund by agreeing to assign control of his company to four universities (Yale, Columbia, Iowa and Minnesota). The odd partnership gave canny Publisher Hecht academic alliances which brought an impressive array of famous educators to Parents’ masthead as “advisory editors.” It also brought the schools a golden flow of income from Parents and a handful of new magazines. By 1949, when Publisher Hecht finally bought up control of Parents Institute, the colleges had already taken out substantial profits.

Big Menu. Hecht’s family of magazines now includes: School and College Management, a monthly free to 32,000 U.S. educators (it pays for itself in advertising); Baby Care Manual (circ. 360,000), a quarterly distributed free to hospitals to give to new mothers; Your New Baby (circ. 400,000), another quarterly bought by diaper services and department stores for distribution to new mothers; Senior Prom (circ. 600,000), a 25¢ monthly for teen-age girls; and Varsity (circ. 250,000), a 25¢ bimonthly for high-school and college boys.

Publisher Hecht has had only one resounding flop. Nine years ago, in an effort to stem the tide of blood & thunder comic books (“I won’t publish stuff like that”), he brought out True Comics to tell the stories of great men and great deeds. True Comics made a poor showing against its hardboiled, blood-spilling brethren, and Hecht recently dropped it. In Children’s Digest, he hopes to put over the idea in a slightly different way. Said hopeful Parent Hecht: “We think we can build the Digest to 1,000,000.”