Always Hope for the best; there's a silver lining to adversity, says a new magazine devoted to the human spirit

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 15, 1996 | by Cheryl Wetzstein

There's a silver lining to adversity, says a new magazine devoted to the human spirit.

At 4 p.m. on May 27, 1992, a bomb blast near the home of cellist Vedran Smailovic killed 22 people standing in line at one of the few working bakeries in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Anguished and outraged, Smailovic decided to act. Every day thereafter, at 4 p.m. precisely, he dressed in formal attire, set up his cello in the crater the bomb had left and performed a concert.

"He played to the abandoned streets, to the smashed trucks and burning buildings and to the terrified people who hid in the cellars while dropped and the bullets flew," composer and writer Paul Sullivan recounts in the premier issue of Hope magazine. Although the shellings went on unabated and death and destruction stalked the streets, he was never hurt; he seemed to be protected by a divine shield, even during his darkest hour when his beloved cello was itself destroyed

According to Jon Wilson, a veteran publisher who launched the bimonthly in Brooklin, Maine, "Hope is a magazine whose mission is to gently alter the ways in which its readers see the world by honoring values worth pursuing, traditions worth preserving and futures worth changing for the better" The magazine won't be just "happy news," he notes, and it will avoid any religious, political or New-Age affiliations. Instead, Hope will celebrate "ordinary and unsung" people and groups whose acts of courage, generosity and goodness often are overlooked.

"We don't live without hope, plain and simple," says Peter Anderheggen of New Hartford, Conn., Wilson's longtime friend and Hope's first subscriber. "Jon's not peddling good news in a Pollyanna way. The magazine will be successful because it demands us to look at things that do not naturally come to mind as hopeful."

Wilson was founding editor of Woodenboat, a publication with a circulation of 100,000 devoted to the building and sailing of wooden boats. He wondered: "If it's possible to find this many readers for a magazine about wooden boats, what might we find with a more important idea?" But two incidents galvanized his nascent idea. In March 1985, the publisher was rocked by the accidental drowning of a colleague's young son and inspired by the outpouring of sorrow and compassion from the community. A month later, Wilson came across a photograph of a soldier casually executing a suspected spy.

"There was something about this moment," he recalls in Hope, "this witness to the extinguishing of a human life, that caught me wholly unprepared, and I began to sob, alone, at the table. I don't know how people can kill, or die, so calmly, and I found this news item overwhelming."

In its debut issue, which appeared on newsstands in mid-March, Hope delves into mental illness, physical disability and death. The magazine features an excerpt from The Place He Made, a book written by Yankee magazine writer Edie Clark about her husband's battle with terminal cancer, and includes articles about:

* The Slick Boys, a group of Chicago cops who write and perform positive rap music.

* Kathy Napolitano, a New Hampshire postal worker who has performed so many acts of kindness on her route that she won the 1995 National Humanitarian Award from the National Association of Letter Carriers.

* Mary Verdi-Fletcher, born with spina bifida and a love for dance, who has helped create a professional dance troupe for people in wheelchairs.

Wilson admits that Hope, with a $24.95 annual subscription rate, is a financial risk. "We're going to have to find the readers first ... and the search for advertising dollars will definitely be a struggle," he says. "But I don't know enough not to do it. And I think it deserves a shot."