The Education of a Yankee; An American Memoir

New York: Harper & Row, 1987. First Edition. First Printing. Hardcover. Very good/Fair. 24 cm, 261, illus., DJ soiled, small tears in rear DJ, pencil erasure on front endpaper The editor-in-chief of Yankee magazine and The Old Farmer's Almanac tells how fate led him toward the New England magazine. The Old Farmer's Almanac has had only 12 editors in its first 197-year history. Judson "Jud" D. Hale Sr. has had the job for 31 of those years. Hale joined the staff at Yankee Inc. later to become Yankee Publishing Inc. in 1958 as assistant editor. He became associate editor, managing editor, and in 1968, editor-in-chief. Besides editing magazines and the almanac, Hale is an author and book editor. In 1982 his book "Inside New England" was published by Harper and Row. Hale's own biography, "The Education of a Yankee," was published by Harper and Row in 1987. Hale graduated from the Choate School in 1951 and Dartmouth college in 1958. Derived from a Publishers Weekly article. The life and times of an unusual New England family engage the reader wholeheartedly in this memoir. Editor-in-chief of Yankee magazine and Old Farmer's Almanac since 1970, Hale, born in Boston in 1933, recalls his privileged if offbeat heritage. When his older brother Drake, brain-damaged at birth, was sent to the Rudolph Steiner School in Switzerland, his parents were inspired to adopt Steiner's controversial experimental principles of education. Purchasing land in backwoods Maine, the family established a cultural-spiritual center that attracted such artists as the late Friedrich Schorr, then deemed the world's greatest Wotan, whom the author remembers singing the Wagnerian role in the wilderness with other guests from the Metropolitan Opera. Meaty anecdotes abound in the book as Hale comes of age, is a bit wild but finally settles and marries in 1958. That same year, his mother suggests to her brother that he hire this son on "the little magazine . . . Yankee,'' just founded by the family. It's a wonderful story.