Shaped by wonderful teachers,
shaping wonderful books 


Fred and Kathy Hills in their home on Stearns Point Road.

When Fred Hills won a scholarship to Columbia, it was indeed the beginning of the rest of his life. His father had lost everything in the crash of ’29 and the family was living in a working class neighborhood in a town on the edge of Newark, New Jersey. They didn’t think of themselves as poor, he remembered, “We just didn’t have any money.” But it was always assumed that of course, everyone would go to college, everyone would have a career. 


Then that first morning came. “I took the Lackawanna Railroad into Hoboken, and then the ferry across the Hudson. It was morning and the light was reflecting off the skyscrapers in Manhattan and it seemed like the whole world was opening up before you and anything was possible.”


But his memories of living “over a candy store in a working class town where the choice was, if you couldn’t get a job with the town, you went to work in the perfume factory or the Wonder Bread factory” are alive and vivid. “It was a little schizophrenic,” he recalled, “because we still had our summer home on the water in Branford, Connecticut, but after a few years that was gone, too. But the great virtue of that is you take nothing for granted and you’re grateful for all the good fortune that comes your way.”


Columbia was an integral part of that good fortune and really changed his life. “It was a great time to be at Columbia, it was the days of Lionel Trilling, Mark Van Doren — my life was shaped by those wonderful teachers.” He went on to earn a graduate degree from Stanford in English, and to a career in publishing. 


“First I was editor-in-chief of the college textbook division at McGraw Hill and I got to travel across the country, always to university campuses, and then was promoted to editor-in-chief of the general books division. I had such great opportunities to work with marvelous writers.” While he had been in graduate school, he’d had a part-time job in a book store and remembered the day he had first picked up a copy of “Lolita,” the year it was published. He’d thumbed through it, was blown away by the prose and spent the five dollars for it that he could ill afford. “But never did I ever imagine that some day I would get to serve as Nabokov’s editor, and that happened at McGraw Hill.” Although “Lolita” had long been published, he did get to edit the screen play when the book was made into a film as well as Nabokov’s last books.


He then moved on to Simon & Schuster where he was paid more as a member of the editorial board than he had been at McGraw Hill as editor-in-chief. Speaking of the editing process, “You have to recognize what your role is, you’re not there to edit the book you would have written but to reinforce the author’s intention. It’s their book, not yours. My love was to work with writers and manuscripts.” Over the years, he’s worked with popular writers as well as literary ones — M. Scott Peck, William Saroyan, Ann Rule, Jane Fonda and Arianna Huffington, to name a few. In fact, he set the record for the greatest number of non-fiction New York Times best sellers published in a single year.


He’s retired now but continues to edit a few writers, an undertaking he’s beginning to phase out. He does volunteer editorial work for Dance Theatre of Harlem and “I’ll look at a manuscript for a friend. But now I spend more time next door at the Perlman Center. It’s such an incredible amenity to have those extremely gifted young kids there every summer.”


Fred’s an avid sailor. He and his wife, Kathy, had a Bellport summer home and sailed a lot. “But the water was too shallow, we wanted deeper water and a bigger boat. We went along every town on the North Fork, and the last place was Shelter Island. It was four in the afternoon, and we drove off the North Ferry and there was this group playing volleyball up the hill. Then we saw the Yacht Club, that has to be the most beautiful harbor on the east coast, and it was all so charming and unpretentious. We immediately knew that this was where we wanted to be. I still feel that way, the Island has the same sense of excitement that New York City gives you.”


He met his wife at work — she was an assistant editor when he was editor-in-chief. Then she went to Random House as senior editor. “But she really wanted to write and we agreed she should do it. Her interest was non-fiction, in particular the health field. So she quit her job.” That was 16 books ago, several of which have been New York Times best sellers. She writes under her maiden name, Matthews, and with her husband maintains a close relationship with both her 20-something-year-old sons. Ted works for the Shelter Island Reporter and his brother Greg leaves any moment for a new position in San Francisco at an Internet technology company. 


It was Ted’s joining the Reporter staff that in part influenced their decision to move here full time. And they’ve become very involved — Kathy’s a trustee of the Yacht Club and has directed their Junior Sailing Program and Fred’s just become more involved with the library — “I love this library! We’re just enjoying every aspect of living out here.” 


One imagines the Island is enjoying them as well.