Foster Parent for the Digest

The Reader's Digest has always been DeWitt and Lila Wallace's only baby--and in 42 years, the Digest has grown into the biggest monthly magazine in the world, with 25 million circulation. For all of those 42 years, the Wallaces maintained total, if benevolent control over the entire operation. And although for the past few years nearly everyone in the Digest's red brick colonial building in Chappaqua, N.Y., 30 miles north of Manhattan, knew that Wally and Lila had picked their successor, everyone also wondered whether the succes sion would ever take place.

Last week, without prior announcement to the staff, and just six weeks past Wally's 75th birthday, the parents of the Digest surrendered the month-to-month care of their creation to other hands.

The magazine's new president: Hobart Durbin Lewis, 55, a Digest staffer for 22 years, an executive editor and vice president since 1961.

Hobe Lewis was both the predicted and the predictable choice. When he came to the Digest in 1942, his only experience was in advertising; everything he learned about journalism he learned from the Wallaces. Lewis proved a good student and rose rapidly on the masthead. He had a thorough working knowledge of the business side of publishing, but he also became, say his colleagues, one of the best story editors in the business.

Three years ago, the Wallaces began shifting some of their own administrative burdens to Lewis. He was deputized as their emissary to Washington, for example, when the Digest's book division decided to condense a volume on the Kennedy Administration in 1962. He traveled with Richard Nixon's 1960 presidential campaign as a Wallace deputy.

Neither Lewis nor anyone else at the Digest really expects the Wallaces to let their concern for the magazine or their control of the product diminish markedly. But the baby does continue to grow, and the parents are getting older. Help was needed at the top, and Digest staffers are unanimous in their relief that the foster parent who was chosen comes not from the business side but from the editorial hierarchy.

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