Writing for Wally: My Life With a Brilliant Idea Paperback - 2014

Graduating from a top tier School off Journalism in 1949, John Hubbell promptly turned down a "good" job as a reporter for a good newspaper in a "nice" town, took a job as a billing clerk that "paid me so well that I sometimes had to hitchhike to or from work and get lunch out of vending machines," and looked for a chance to work his way into the world of major league magazine journalism. "That," he explains, "was where the glory and the money was, just as today it's in TV journalism." Soon enough he found himself sitting in the office of DeWitt Wallace, the legendary founding Editor-in Chief of The Reader's Digest, history's most successful journalistic enterprise, who praised his work and hired him, instructing him that "if you have to go to Timbuktu to get a paragraph to make a story right, you don't have to ask anyone's, permission." In the 40-plus following years he produced approximately 140 Digest pieces, including a book he co-authored on the Cuban Missile Crisis, wrote another depicting the American prisoner of war experience in Vietnam that the Washington Post characterized as "the standard book on the subject"; and a book-length feature that won him the Sigma Delta Chi Professional Journalism Society's Distinguished Service Award for Magazine Reporting. In "Writing for Wally," Hubbell recalls growing up in northern New Jersey, where he deliberately "flunked" kindergarten, Atlanta, Richmond and Minneapolis, which he reached at age 12 and where, at the urging of DeWitt Wallace, he has happily lived for the rest of his life. With the love of his life, his wife, Katherine, he has produced nine children, who (so far) have produced 27 grandchildren, who have (so far) produced two great grandchildren. "A houseful of children," he says, "is a houseful of laughs." Accordingly, he wrote many hilarious family humor pieces which were hugely popular with the Digest's immense audience. Born in New York City, Hubbell was the youngest of four children born to Lester S. and Margaret Malia Hubbell. His father's abilities as a sales manager resulted in frequent transfers, thus his early education occurred in five different locales. He served in the Navy late inWorld War II and never achieved the status of either of his two older brothers, one of whom became an admiral, the other a captain. His sister, Peggy, died in 1969. Hubbell retired in 1993. He continues to live happily with his wife in Minnetonka, Minnesota, among many of his "kids and grandkids."