Just a Little Jog — 29
What happens to a community when it loses its prominent institution, the one that was thought to be the font of its lifeblood? That's a question I ponder during my COVID-year reverie through town.
What I learned early . . . (advisory: what I learned early but have not fact-checked) . . . what I learned over glasses of wine, beer or gin-and-tonic in not only the Kittle bar but at cocktail parties in the Captain Merritt’s neighborhood was that ours was — still, and more than a mite stubbornly — a Reader’s Digest-influenced community, but that this status was, due to forces beyond any one person’s control, on the wane and probably destined for a resting place in Days of Yore lectures series as local libraries.
Many friends we met at the Kittle House or at backyard gatherings on Cerf Lane were more than happy to testify regarding The Good Old Days. They could do so with authority, regaling with firsthand and usually fond RD memories of their long time there. I, a Time Incer in the city rather than a Digestif, could talk could talk only about an on-site visit, or offer the about about my grandmother’s ottoman, where always sat a copy of the Digest. But at pretty much any party I could find a congenial foursome sharing Digest lore and legend and, sucker as I am for stories from the magazine trade, I leaned in. I heard of olden days, times gone by, Golden Eras, faded heydays. Economically speaking and in terms of percentage of the local workforce, greater New Castle inn 2001 (or so) was in no way RD-centric or RD-dependent anymore. But the weaning had been painful, and lingering pains could yet be seen in the eyes of the veterans.
In the two decades that Luci and I watched from our vantage point one highway stop north, Reader’s Digest as a physical institution shrank within its campus, then deserted surrendered the hill altogether. RD’s erasure from our commercial and cultural canvases has been accompanied by a grudgingly diminished concern about What It All Means — a worry far more pronounced in 2001 than it two decades later. Here’s my thoroughly unoriginal observation: In life, “Good God! What will we do now!?!” often rounds and weathers to “Well, let’s get on with it.”
It’s that notion that has caused me to think of Reader’s Digest as a younger, brighter sibling of the now completely forgotten Spencer Optical, which I told you about shortly ago. I’m going to develop that thesis further. Amusing myself, I’ll sketch the fading noise of the alarm as the RD battery ran down in recent years, finally being tossed and requiring replacement.
At the Cheeverian socials of our first decade hereabouts, I heard nothing but dewy Those Were the Days reminiscences about RD: “My grandmother worked there . . . My dad was an editor there for thirty years . . . My aunt was So-and-So’s secretary for his whole career, and he always gave her a bottle of Chivas Regal ‘to take home to your husband’ at Christmas . . . Do you know Ben Cheever down in Pleasantville? His father was John? Ben’s a writer too. Ben worked at the Digest . . . I worked there myself when I was quite young . . . Everyone worked there, at one point . . . Mr. Wallace himself would personally go around each evening when he heard the bell ring at the Presbyterian church. He’d reach in and shut off everyone’s lights and tell everyone it was time to go home. ‘Have dinner with your family! Tend to your garden!’ Sweet man . . . Mr. Wallace was a helluva guy. . . Damn fine guy, Mr. Wallace.”
Among the tales that I heard more than once, and which therefore I suspect are true, were these:
–Pegasus-emblazoned silver compacts and gold pocketknives were given to women and men, respectively, for a decade of service to the company.
—After five years more, members of either gender received a silver traveling clock.
—Twenty-year veterans were awarded two tickets to Bermuda with extra vacation time to enjoy the trip.
—The end-of-the-year parties featured a no-bad-option surf-or-turf choice: filet mignon, or lobster?
—One man, and perhaps one man only, was sufficiently derelict in his duties to get himself canned by the uber-boss. Even the unbeatably beneficent Mr. Wallace, a softy among softies, had to admit that not showing up for work for eight consecutive weeks constituted a firing offense.
—All those stories about the gardens.
—The story about the helicopter.
These last items rank highest in the “oft-told” category, and therefore deserve — demand — elaboration. Even the smallest bouquet of RD’s Gardens stories wants a paragraph of its own, and the helicopter escapade needs more than that.
Regarding matters floricultural and horticultural, we start in one splendid sector of the Digestland acreage where there was an apple orchard bearing fruit that was anything but forbidden. Employees could pluck a snack or bring home a bushel as the mood struck, and they were encouraged to do so. Furthermore, there were fenced vegetable and flower plots, which workers could rent for ten dollars per season. Many folks tended their workplace gardens during lunch hours and harvested produce before heading home. These edicts and allowances came from the very top. Lila Wallace herself, as much a lover of tissue-and-sap lilies, tulips, pansies, irises, sunflowers and assorted doronicums as she was of Monet’s representations of such, was the Good Queen of Chappaqua’s Versailles. She instituted all of the gracious gardening policies, and oversaw a Summer Friday Quitting Time of midday so that workers could turn, or return home to, their gardens. This was all on the company’s dime, and needless to say, Digest employees who were blessed with green thumbs — or those who claimed to be so blessed, but were actually bellying up to the Kittle House bar at noon on Fridays — were happy campers indeed.
The helicopter story seems a little leaky when constructed from the hodgepodge of testimony gleaned during gin-fueled sessions at Cerf Lane parties, but I’ve found, but researching when stone cold sober, that it’s more accurate than not. As Henry Kissinger observed more than once (actually, he was cribbing from Plato regarding Atlantis, while never copping to the plagiarism): At bottom, it has the added advantage of being true.
DeWitt Wallace did not have a helicopter and did not commute from Bedford to Chappaqua by helicopter, although some folks have insisted to me that he did. He probably owned an airplane at one point in the 1930s, probably for recreation. There was indeed a hangar on the grounds of High Winds, so that implies aircraft. I’ve heard that he would take joy rides above the scenic Hudson Highlands but once had a narrow escape, after which Lila insisted that her husband and his toy plane were grounded. DeWitt’s angel wings had been clipped.
That prelude material is all: “Perhaps so.”
In any event, the airplane/helicopter saga, as hazy in its Genesis chapter as the origin story of Howard Hughes’s Spruce Goose, took a documentable turn not long after our family arrived hereabouts and began socializing in Mount Kisco. What we first heard as gossip proved to be fact-checkable: In 1986 a financier named Norman Peltz bought the High Winds estate for six million dollars. He also bought a six-passenger Sikorski helicopter for about the same price and began the habit of traveling aloft from his backyard helipad to his Manhattan office. His Westchester neighbors didn’t like the noise, and worried that a precedent might lead to a flock of other high-flying arrivistes following suit in Bedford and Katonah. A lawsuit was filed against Peltz by the town of Bedford. Peltz, in his defense, pointed to DeWitt’s left-behind hangar and said that his own flying machine should be grandfathered-in. Issuing a slur that surely was credited by no one in our town, he alleged snobbery — snobbery! Imagine! — in Northern Westchester County: “DeWitt Wallace could have flown around this property in a rocket ship and no one would complain. The difference is he made his money with Reader’s Digest and I made my money in junk bonds.” In a fun fact to know and tell, one of Peltz’s nearest and most pissed off neighbors was the actor E.G. Marshall, and anyone might have told Peltz that it was a mug’s game to rile a man whose fame rested on an acute TV-series portrayal of an indomitable lawyer. After five full years of litigation, an appeals court silenced Peltz’s engine for good in 2001.
So that’s the True Helicopter Story, all the way through to what I know of its denouement, and I think it’s rich to rife with lessons and morals and symbols for not only any Chappauan but for the human race. Whether there’s a postscript — for instance, whether there’s still a hangar at High Winds, or even whether Peltz still lives there — I am uncertain. But if there is . . . Well, that’s added poignance to the tale, and even more of a message. I’m sure there’s a Rosebud among those rusting High Winds aircraft.
As the irresistible Copter-gate chronicles were making the rounds of our gatherings in Mount Kisco a few years ago, other sure signs of the Apocalypse were being bantered: Donald Trump wants to build a golf course on Seven Springs! That’s where wonderful Kay Graham’s lived! The horror! . . . That other place that used to be The Tavern is for sale! That’s where Sinatra and Mia stayed! Such calamity!! . . . There are more layoffs coming at Reader’s Digest!!! I’ve heard they might move!!!! To NEW YORK CITY!!!! . . . I’ve heard they might go BANKRUPT!!!!
The gentle, genteel, thoroughly wonderful world of the Wallaces—and such as Sinatra and Cerf and Greeley, other Quakers and George Washington’s men bivouacing up near Ben & Jerry’s, and Chief Kisco and his tribe before the White Men . . .
All of that world was clearly doomed.
It’ll be all bond traders and hedge fund managers now!
They’ll take over the schools. Their kids will cheat at sports. They’ll cheat on their SATs!!
It’s already happening!!!
It’s already happened!!!!
As the last Beefeater bottles were being drained, the party-goers gazed at the hills beyond and pondered: Who are we? Who are we any longer?
Who are we to be, tomorrow?