George J. Hecht

George Joseph Hecht (November 1, 1895 – April 23, 1980) was the founder and publisher of Parents magazine and owner of FAO Schwarz. He is often credited with creating the parenting advice industry through his many publications.

Hecht was born in New York City in 1895 in a home that once stood on the site of Radio City. He attended the Ethical Culture School and graduated from Cornell University in 1917. With the outbreak of World War I, he became volunteer head of the financial department of New York's office of the American Ambulance Field Service and worked as a civilian for various war-related efforts, such as promoting the sale of Liberty Bonds and conducting research for the War Trade Board. He became head of the Bureau of Cartoons, encouraging cartoonists to publish work in support of the war effort, and he published a collection of war cartoons titled The War in Cartoons. Although he joined the United States Army as a private in 1918, he was not called to active service.

After the war, Hecht edited Better Times, a monthly social welfare publication, which he turned into an influential weekly representing two thousand private and public charitable agencies. In 1925, he organized the Welfare Council of New York City. In 1938, he became founding secretary of the Greater New York Fund, which eventually merged with United Way of New York.

Concerned about a lack of resources on parenting, Hecht received funding from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Foundation to launch Parents magazine in September 1926. It quickly became the most widely circulated magazine dedicated to parenting in the world, leading Hecht to launch a variety of other journals aimed at parents and children, including The Boy's and Girl's Newspaper, Your New Baby, Children's Digest, and Humpty Dumpty, which became the most popular children's magazine in the United States.

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