George J. Hecht
American magazine publisher (1895-1980)
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.
Life and career
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.
“George J. Hecht” enters the record as american magazine publisher (1895-1980). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what George, Hecht and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q26220761. VIAF identifies the subject as 23221690. The Library of Congress control number is n2011024943. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1895, 1980, 1917 and 1918.
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This entry incorporates text from “George J. Hecht” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.