“Miraculously, his airway cleared. My wonderful son lived. And now he’s a doctor.”
—Judy Hoopman of Fredericksburg, Texas, describing how her two-year-old son was choking when she remembered reading about the brand-new Heimlich maneuver and “frantically applied the technique.”
“I WAS 11 MONTHS OLD. The bathtub had only six inches of water. My mother left to warm my bottle and returned to find me facedown and blue. She remembered reading in that you could blow Reader’s Digest air into drowning victims, which she did. A recent immigrant, she’d subscribed to improve her English. After that she swore to subscribe for the rest of her life. Another woman saved a child in Sausalito, California, when she remembered the same article [‘The Day My Son Drowned,’ August 1958].”
—Monika Kinstler,
Manchester, Connecticut
“My teacher read ‘What the Cigarette Commercials Don’t Show’ to us. It’s by a 44-year-old man with throat cancer due to smoking. He describes his horrifying hospital stay, his wife’s pain, his children’s pain, and the battle to save his voice, which he loses along with his larynx and pharynx. He also describes the beautiful people in the smoking ads on TV. All the people in my family were smokers. Not me—every time I wanted to smoke, I reread the article. Many years later, I taught biology and read it to my students. I told them if they were ever tempted to smoke, to remember what I read to them.”
—Elise Vitow, Lawrence, New York