Why Highlights Magazine Ended Up in Waiting Rooms

In the waiting room of a doctor's office or a dentist's office almost anywhere in America, there is a good chance you will find a small, colorful magazine with a puzzle called Hidden Pictures on the cover. It has been showing up there for more than 70 years, and almost nobody knows how it got that habit - or that the company nearly went under before it did.

A Magazine Built Above a Car Dealership

In June 1946, Garry Cleveland Myers and his wife Caroline Clark Myers set up a two-room office above a car dealership in Honesdale, Pennsylvania. Garry held a PhD in psychology from Columbia University.

The couple had spent years editing another children's magazine, Children's Activities, and had grown uneasy with how much advertising filled its pages. When they started their own magazine, they decided it would carry none.

They finished the first issue within a month and ordered 20,000 copies from a printer in Columbus, Ohio. The Myerses drove the manuscript there themselves.

Nearly Broke

The first issue sold poorly. Staff went door to door around Honesdale selling copies out of their own hands to make up the shortfall.

About four years in, the magazine was still losing money and close to folding. That was when the Myerses' son stepped in.

The Waiting Room Idea

Garry Myers Jr. was 28 and working as an aeronautical engineer. He took a leave from his job to help his struggling parents.

His idea was simple: leave copies of the magazine in doctors' and dentists' waiting rooms, where bored kids stuck waiting for a checkup or a filling would pick them up.

It worked. Parents saw the magazine in the waiting room, liked what their kids were reading, and subscribed. Within a decade, Highlights had passed 500,000 subscribers.

No Ads, Ever

The no-advertising policy the Myerses set in 1946 has held for the print magazine ever since. Today, Highlights publishes six magazines with a combined circulation of roughly one million copies a month.

"Highlights doesn't have advertising, and parents can know their kids aren't going to be marketed to," pediatrician Dr. Dipesh Navsaria told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2026.

Every Letter Gets a Reply

Kids have been writing "Dear Highlights" letters since the magazine's first year. Reader mail coordinator Patty Courtright has said the magazine receives about 3,000 of these letters a year - and answers every one.

In 2006, the U.S. Postal Service delivered the one-billionth copy of Highlights ever mailed.

Still Family-Owned

Highlights turns 80 in 2026. It is still headquartered in Honesdale, still run by the family that founded it - CEO Kent S. Johnson is the great-grandson of Garry and Caroline Myers - and the waiting room habit their son started around 1950 never stopped.