Is this the one with “Marie”? If so, I remember it too. 
Wasn’t there a story where someone lost their entire extended family in a horrible automobile accident and was in a daze when a neighbor came by and asked if there was anything he could do for her?
IIRC, she was sedated and put to bed. When she woke up the next morning, she found that her neighbor, like an elf in the night, had spit-polished all of her family’s shoes so they could have decent footware for the funeral.
She likened this act of altruism to Jesus washing the feet of His disciples.
Then there was the one about the Soviet pilot who recognized how rotten the Communist system was and defected by flying his MiG-25 Foxbat to Japan in 1976. He had to leave his wife and little daughter behind to get out and build a new life in the West.
Leaving his wife was no big deal (he provoked a huge argument with her so she would have no lingering feelings for him after he was gone), but his little daughter (whom he had secretly had baptized) was another matter.
I vaguely recall a piece titled The Sad Little Puppy With Cancer That Inspired a Sad Little Boy With Cancer To Live On Until Christmas but then the receptionist said the dentist was ready for me so I didn’t get a chance to read it.
The one that got me was called, I think, “A Cry Came Ringing Down”. Funny, I was just thinking of it. The story was about a catcher for a zoo who nabbed a falcon. He had it overnight and was checking it over in the morning. Something about the defeated attitude of the bird made him let it go. It’s mate had been circling, waiting, and when the falcon flew up, the mate called out. It’s very beautifully written.
This one was actually reprinted when they began putting in some of the classic articles a few years ago.
At one point, I had a full set from the late Sixties to 1995, but I lost them. Damn, I love RD but they got thin and expensive.
That was based on a true story but with the names changed. Here’s an article on the actual case.
She made a good point.
Just as I should know better than to open a thread titled “Most Sob-worthy Story from Reader’s Digest”…
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the book was And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts. Can’t recommend the book more highly. It’s on my top ten list of favorite books ever. It is crushingly tragic, infuriating, and informative. The author himself died of AIDS not long after publication.
As mentioned upthread, the Patient Zero thesis has since been discredited. But it is only a small part of the narrative presented in that book.
Interesting, thank you so much.
My mom kept the Reader’s Digest in the bathroom and I read so much of it while on the can as a child, I’m surprised I don’t remember more stories.
Nitpick: She was not sedated. She watched him work, and that brought her out of her distracted state, so she could focus on what she needed to do.
I would have mentioned this one if you hadn’t, though. What I got from it was not the Jesusy stuff, but the idea that when someone has a crisis, a friend should do something concrete to help, not ask “Can I do anything?” of someone who can’t think about what they themselves can do.
I remember a Drama in Real Life about a woman who was in a car accident on a highway and lost her leg. A motorist stopped and put a tourniquet on her thigh and then dodged traffic to get her disconnected leg from one of the father out lanes, put a tourniquet on it and drove them to a hospital where doctors re-attached it. I don’t know if it was successful or not. I remember it mostly because of the artist drawn picture of a (not too bloody) severed leg lying there on the blacktop with cars going by. This was sometime in the 1970s.
I recall reading I Killed Your Dog Today and got really angry but sad too.
I remember one that made me cry when I was a kid in the 60s, “The best place to bury a dog” - is in the heart of its master.
I read tons of old digests as a kid, but for some reason the only story coming to mind is the guy who broke into someone’s house and robbed an old woman and she converted him to Christianity on the spot.
I started reading digests when I was 8 and I had no clue what some of the stories were about. “Women Who Are Once-a-Month Witches” was completely incomprehensible since I didn’t know what hormones or menstruation were. I was more into the factual pieces like “I am Joe’s Lung”
“A Sandpiper to Give You Joy” was the only tearjerker I could remember without prompting but looking through this thread reminded me of the canned pears and “My Father’s Hands” (sniff sniff) and I cried again just now for poor Herbie Wirth.
After a while I got tired of all the Soviet spy stories. And does anyone remember a short (half-page?) item about a Soviet woman official who came to the US boasting that everything in the USSR was better but when brought to a supermarket just burst into tears looking at all the food available.
**Their joke section was always mighty sad.
I vaguely kinda half-remember a Readers Digest story (presented as truth, not fiction) in which the earth basically opened up and a sinkhole/mudstream suddenly caused houses, cars and people to be swept away in a sudden muddy river. I think it was in Texas.
I came across that story at age 8 or so, while waiting in an auto repair shop with my mother somewhere, since my parents were far too snobbish to subscribe to Readers Digest. It instigated a tremendous interest in the science and sociology of natural disasters. My fascination persists to this day, decades later. I am drawn to stories of tsunamis, mudslides, avalanches, earthquakes…any kind of natural disaster. (Tornadoes, hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones, blizzards are also interesting, but I am more compelled toward the geological than the meteorological).
I remember one about a four-year old hearing-impaired boy who was signing to his parents at bedtime.
They slapped his hands as they’d been taught by a professional to discourage signing.
The child burst into tears. The parents later learned that he’d been signing “I love you” to them.
It may have been a story about this; it happened in Quebec in 1971.
It may have been a story about this; it happened in Quebec in 1971.
One of RD’s condensed books: The Seeing Eye.
It is by Morris Frank, a blind man who was pretty much the first person to get a Seeing Eye dog. It is not only the story of how he learned to work with Buddy (his dog), and how Buddy freed him from relying on the sighted; but also how he had to fight for the right to take Buddy where Frank needed to go: trains, hotels, restaurants, and so on. Today, service animals are accepted everywhere, but as the story of Morris Frank and Buddy illustrated, even in the RD version, it was a tough hill to climb. Some of what they encountered–definitely sob-worthy.
I’ve never been able to read Morris Frank’s original book–I’ve only read the RD condensed version. I’d like to read the original someday.