Contents
Wallace's Report '09: Appraising a Decade
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Wallace's Report '09: Appraising a Decade
Throughout their professional careers and in later years, DeWitt and Lila Wallace dedicated themselves to improving other people’s lives. Giving freely of their time and of the wealth amassed from the magazine they co-founded, Reader’s Digest, both led lives of service through their support of a range of causes, especially in the arts and education.
Early in life, Lila Bell Acheson, an English teacher-turned-social worker, helped establish a YWCA for industrial workers in Minneapolis. DeWitt Wallace, an avid reader and son of a Greek scholar and college president, worked as a young man in a St. Paul public library and dreamed of publishing a magazine of condensed general- interest articles. Married in 1921, Lila and DeWitt moved to New York City and published the first edition of Reader’s Digest in January 1922. From an initial circulation of 5,000, the “little magazine” started by the Wallaces quickly caught on, and over time it became the foundation of a worldwide publishing organization. Once their livelihood was secured, they were able to turn to their first love, helping people.
A lover of arts as well as nature, Lila became associated with support for many of the nation’s great arts and cultural institutions. Among her many acts of philanthropy, she funded the restoration of the Metropolitan Museum’s Great Hall and to this day, the hall has fresh flowers through a fund she established for that purpose. France awarded her that nation’s Legion of Honor for her help in restoring the house and gardens in Giverny where the painter Claude Monet lived.
DeWitt’s philanthropic passions lay in supporting education and a range of youth opportunities. Among the many beneficiaries of his giving were Macalester College, where he studied; Outward Bound, a rugged outdoor learning program that he himself participated in at age 88; and the New York Public Library, where, as a beginning editor, he condensed articles by hand. Of his lifelong interest in education, he once said, “America isn’t paying sufficient attention to its classrooms … My father and my grandfather were devoted to education and they each did something that made a difference. But I can do more. I have the good fortune … to be a wealthy man. So I should be able to make a bigger difference.”
Drawing on the original vision of our founders, The Wallace Foundation remains faithful to the words DeWitt wrote at age 17 as his life’s goal: “to serve my fellow man.”
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