William C. Hall - Veritas

My career, spanning more than five decades, has centered on sales and marketing in consumer goods and newsstand sales of magazines. I started working in grocery stores in high school in Chicago, and my first adult job, after military service, was in sales with Colgate-Palmolive in Illinois and Wisconsin. I subsequently worked in sales for a toiletries jobber in Iowa and Ohio and, still later, as a buyer for an IGA wholesale grocer in Michigan.

The wholesale-grocery experience led to a job at the headquarters of the Kroger Co. in Cincinnati, and eventually to the job of director of general merchandise for the supermarket company’s 1,500 stores. My experience as both buyer and seller led to my next career move to the suburbs of New York City.

Because of my knowledge of magazine marketing in supermarkets, I was recruited by the owner of the National Enquirer, who was converting a weekly crime tabloid, sold mostly in metropolitan New York, into a celebrity paper inspired by Rupert Murdoch’s British and Australian tabloids. Five years later, the Enquirer was on every checkout of every supermarket and convenience store in America. My job was done at that point, and I started my consulting business.

My first client was Time Inc.’s People Magazine, which had just been launched and was falling far short of sales projections. After a couple of months of consulting, I was asked to head a new subsidiary company that I designed as a consultant, to handle the newsstand sales of all Time Inc. publications (Time, Life, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, Money, People – and later – Southern Living and Sunset magazines). People’s fortunes were turned around in under 12 months, and it became the most successful magazine in the world for the next 20 years.

Subsequently, I worked for CBS (when it had a magazine division) and still later for the French publisher Hachette, after it acquired the CBS magazine group.

After that, I did consulting work for the next 20 years and became a writer for The Beacon when I moved to DeLand in 1995. I was always interested in writing, history and politics, and had been exposed to the ideas and ideals of many journalists.

If I regret anything about my career, it is that I came too late to writing. The keyboard and wordsmithing are far more gratifying than the gritty world of circulation.