Founded in 1946 by husband-and-wife team Dr. Garry Cleveland and Caroline Myers, Highlights for Children, Inc., is dedicated to the belief that "children are the world's most important people." Every Highlights product helps children become their best selves and become curious, creative, caring and confident individuals
Highlights Magazine was originally intended for kid’s age’s two to twelve. It serves those ages, and grapples with the issues young people face every day. Not only traditional ones like best friend conflicts, but new challenges like digital overload. The magazine is a constant, steadying influence in the lives of children, and it holds a big place in their lives. Highlights for Children is a force (and cultural phenomena) in the lives of children around the world. Here are 10 facts you may not know about this magazine:
1.
EARLY ISSUES
DREW CONTENT FROM A HOLY SOURCE (SEVERAL OF THEM, ACTUALLY): Highlights
has a long tradition of helping children point their moral compass in the
direction of goodness. In the early
days, that mission included publishing passages from the Bible. But the goal was never to push one ideology: Bible stories ran alongside pieces on
other world religions, such as Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism. “I was actually
very shocked," art director Patrick Greenish Jr. admitted. "For
some odd reason, I always thought Highlights
was a Christian brand. And they're not. Having good morals doesn't mean you
have to be Christian. It's just knowing right from wrong. It's essentially what
it boils down to.”
2.
EDITORS TAKE
THEIR RESPONSIBILITY TO YOUNG READERS VERY SERIOUSLY: “We
get about 3,000 Dear Highlights letters a year,” Reader Mail coordinator Patty
Courtright said. “We reply to every letter that we receive from a child. I
believe that we're the only magazine who writes to a child every time one
writes.” That dedication has made Highlights
a vital outlet for children. “We know that they're writing to us with a real
issue that is very serious to them,” editorial assistant Allison Kane said. And
sometimes, the issues are capital-S serious. “If it's a real touchy situation,”
like running away, abuse, or divorce, “we put a red sticker on those and try to
respond to those as soon as possible,”
Courtright explained. “A little girl said she was being
abused by her babysitter and she was told not to tell anybody and this child confided
in us. She didn't know what to do. That was a case where we got the authorities
involved and the mother was so thankful because she had no clue, of course,
that this was going on.” The experience really shook Courtright, but “then I
realized, thank god the child felt that she could write to us.”
3.
GOOFUS AND GALLANT
USED TO BE MORE TOLKIEN THAN KIDS-NEXT-DOOR: Goofus and Gallant
is one of the perennial features of Highlights,
a comic strip featuring two boys who represent very clear sides of a challenge.
“Here's the bad choice, here's the good choice,” assistant editor Annie Beer
Rodriguez explained. Added Mikelson: “Goofus is the bad and Gallant is the
good, always.” The characters first appeared in 1940 in Children’s Activities, the magazine Garry C. Myers worked on before creating Highlights with his wife. But their
didactic adventures originally had a more fantastic bent: They first appeared
as little elves, before becoming more recognizably human in 1950.
4.
HIGHLIGHTS
MIGHT HAVE HELPED JAYCEE DUGARD AND HER KIDS: "Dear
Highlights" isn’t the only section of the magazine with the potential to
impact children’ lives in major ways. "Ask Arizona"—an advice column
penned by the fictional character Arizona, who answers imaginary letters based
on real kid submissions—is a relatively new creation. Author Lissa Rovetch has
written more than 140 of them, and they can address big topics like transgender
issues and scary environmental problems. “I know that it makes a difference for
children all over the world,” Rovetch explained. “Several years ago, a girl was
kidnapped. For many years, she lived in somebody's backyard and he raped her
and she had his two little girls. She was allowed very, very few things from
the outside world, and one of the things was Highlights magazine. So the idea, for me, that my stories about
how to be a kind, real, feeling, decent human being in the world and it's OK to
be scared, it's OK to be nervous, it's OK to be angry, these little girls got
that was incredibly moving to me."
5. IF YOU'VE EVER SENT A LETTER OR ARTWORK TO HIGHLIGHTS, YOU’RE IN THE OHIO STATE
UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES: If you read Highlights as a kid, you probably submitted a poem or story or
letter or drawing, hoping to one day see your name or work in your favorite
magazine. (Submissions are still rolling in: Dujardin says they get 300 fiction
pieces a month.) Even if you got a reply from an editor, odds are you didn’t
get published in Highlights.
But here’s some validation: Highlights
saved everything—everything—and,
about a decade ago, donated its archive,
spanning the years 1946 to 2007, to Ohio State University.
6.
IT HAS FEATURED
SOME MAJOR CONTRIBUTORS: If a magazine is as old as Highlights, chances are good that
some pretty big names will have passed through its pages. To date, Highlights has published works from Lewis Carroll,
Carl Sandburg, Ogden Nash, Emily Dickinson,
Langston Hughes,
Rita Dove There is a story bylined by
Robert Louis Stevenson. And later, editor-in-chief Christine French Cully
shares with editor Judy Burke a gem she unearthed from the archives: a letter
from Highlights editor Walter
B. Barre, dated February 6, 1968, buying a piece from Walter Cronkite titled
"Political Conventions." "We are happy to purchase all rights
including copyright to this manuscript for the sum of $200,” Barre wrote. (It’s
unclear whether the piece ever ran.)
7.
MEDICAL
PROFESSIONALS RESUSCITATED HIGHLIGHTS: Without
the medical community, there would absolutely not be Highlights today. About
four years into the magazine's launch, the Myers was out of money. Their son,
Garry Jr (then a 28-year-old aeronautical engineer) took a six-month leave from
his job to help his parents wind the business down. “Instead, when he got there
and he started looking into it, he decided that he could make it go,” Garry
Jr.'s daughter Pat Mikelson,
who is now Highlights’
historian and archivist, said. “My dad rolled out this program to put Highlights into doctors' and
dentists' offices and that really is what made Highlights take off and sustain us so we could earn enough money
that we could definitely grow and continue.”
8.
THE HIDDEN
PICTURE PUZZLES COME WITH SPECIFIC RULES: Illustrator
Neil Numberman has contributed numerous pieces to Highlights, including Hidden Pictures, mazes, word searches, and
crossword puzzles. As a result, he has gained some unique insights into what
works—and what doesn’t when it comes to those venerable Hidden Picture puzzles.
“Highlights took us out to a
retreat, and it was literally a Hidden Pictures class,” Numberman said. “You
can have more difficult ones and easier ones in an illustration. They actually
prefer that so that the kid will find something easily and then start to get
engaged with the piece. They want the hidden objects to stay away from the
crotch. That's the funniest feedback. Sometimes I'll have a rooster and he'll
have a tail and I'll say that could be a glove. But since the glove is coming
out of the butt, you can't do that.”
9.
THE MAGAZINE (AND
THE FAMILY RUNNING IT) WERE ROCKED BY UNIMAGINABLE DISASTER: Ten
years after Garry Jr. saved Highlights,
the company had reached 500,000 subscribers and he was thinking of expanding
its reach. On December 16, 1960, Myers, his wife Mary, and vice president Cyril
Ewart boarded a plane in Columbus, Ohio, bound for New York for a meeting about
getting the magazine on newsstands. “They went into New York in a snowstorm,”
Mikelson recalled. “And there was a mid-air collision between two planes. One
of the planes landed on a street in Brooklyn .Everyone on those airplanes lost
their lives.” The crash between the United Airlines DC-8 and a TWA Super
Constellation is one of the most notorious
and tragic
aviation disasters in American history.
Mikelson and her four
siblings went to live with an uncle in Texas while her grandparents—who by this
time were in their 70s—stepped in to help guide the magazine. “Highlights survived," Mikelson
said. "My grandparents just decided they were going to go forward. As a
family, it was very difficult, and it was for many years. We all made it
through.”
10.
YOU WON'T FIND
ANY STORIES ABOUT WITCHES IN HIGHLIGHTS'S
PAGES: One of the realities of working for a children's publication
is that you inevitably steer clear of some topics, or at least give them more
thought than you would at a general audience publication. One potential
minefield is holidays: You don’t want to alienate anyone or make them feel like
their celebration is less important than another. So it makes sense when Highlights senior editor Joëlle
Dujardin explained that the magazine does not publish fiction pieces about
Santa Claus.
Stories about witches are another no-go zone, which also
tracks; there are a lot of people who don’t want their children exposed to the
supernatural, but that’s not why Highlights
avoids them. “We don't cover [witches] to respect the Wiccan community's
feelings about witches and the portrayal of them as being dark and scary,
whereas a lot of Wiccan people are not,” Dujardin says. “There are no witches,
no Santa, no child trafficking.” (That last one seems obvious, but in the
documentary we see Dujardin reading a kid-submitted a story about children being
kidnapped.)
“if you make the world better for kids,
you make it better for everybody." (Kid President)[i]
[i] Sources used:
·
“10 Surprising Facts about Highlights Magazine” BY Dante A Ciampaglia
·
“Company
History” by Highlights.com
This post is
dedicated to my good family friend, Charlotte Massey.
For more
information on Highlights Magazine, see
the Netflix documentary 44 Pages (number
of pages in magazine)
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