Word: lila
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...future was on them before they knew it. The mail poured in from subscribers, bringing ecstatic testimonials. Wrote "L.M.W." from Pennsylvania: "Its contents seem like nuggets of gold." "The Reader's Digest," announced Editor Lila Bell Acheson in the second issue, "is successful beyond all anticipations." The fifth month brought a crisis; the Digest couldn't pay the printer, and Wallace was plunged in gloom. At first Lila was crushed by these moods, which would "just descend on him like a black cloud. It was all new to me-it just isn't in my nature...
When Wallace bought a huge old desk and moved it-with a secretary-into their already cramped quarters, Lila rented an empty pony shed next to the garage for $10 a month, and turned it into the Digest's office. When Ralph Henderson, a jungle-born son of missionaries, dropped in from nearby White Plains to see what the little magazine was like, the Wallaces hired him as business manager, soon made him an editor. They later hired Harold Lynch, an assistant Episcopal rector, to handle the money. The Digest soon outgrew the pony shed, and spread all over...
...tentative issue. But a day or two before the deadline, Wallace may toss out a third of it and put in something else. He makes the final decisions, when he is at Chappaqua. But he is often away: he and Lila may pick up suddenly and go off on a three months' trip to Honolulu or Pago Pago, and no one will hear from him until he walks back into the office...
...crusades ("One cigarette," quoted the first Digest, "will kill a cat"), he smokes steadily. He also likes to drink, and regularly used to sit up all night playing poker. He learned to fly his own plane, and, until the Army commandeered it during World War II, liked to scare Lila by buzzing their house. He drives his car so recklessly that few who know him will ride with him. He still likes to play pranks. Once, on his way to a Halloween party, he sent word that he had been hurt in an auto accident. Then he tottered...
Wallace does much of his work at night at High Winds, the five-bedroom, castle-like stone house he and Lila built on a bluff above a small lake five miles from the Digest. They have little social life outside occasional cocktail parties for the staff. In the evening, after dinner, they like to dance for 15 minutes in their rumpus room...