Port Jeff Station Man’s Joke For Reader's Digest is Real Life Anecdote

“My wife is not known for her culinary skills,” begins a funny story by Herman van Vliet, a Port Jefferson Station resident who .

The sales manager for a company that makes products for the building and automotive industries says that it wasn’t really a joke at all but something he heard one of his kids say one day.

“It was just so funny to hear a child say something in complete innocence which an adult may say as a joke,” he told Patch by email.

Van Vliet, 45, has been reading Reader's Digest since he was little because his parents – both immigrants who did not speak English – used the magazine to learn the language.

“My father is from Holland and speaks Dutch,” he explained. “My mother is from Colombia and speaks Spanish.”

While on vacation in New York, his mother met his father at a party while he was here with the Dutch Merchant Marines.

“They ended up dating and using Dutch to English and Spanish to English dictionaries to communicate to each other,” van Vliet said.

When they married they settled in New York and in order for them to communicate and assimilate their children in their adopted country they had to learn English. They also had to learn to speak with each other.

“They never took an English class but learned the language from the pages of Reader's Digest and a little help from Sesame Street,” said van Vliet.

The magazine had a vocabulary section and the famously condensed articles were easier for them to read. The younger van Vliet drifted toward the magazine because they were always around and the short articles caught his interest. It also helped him as a first generation American to learn history and culture.

“I guess you can say that Reader's Digest helped me understand what it was like to be an American,” he said. “It taught me things that you don't learn in school, the nuances and life in this great country.”

When van Vliet’s young child quipped about his wife’s cooking, he thought it was funny and that it would be perfect for the magazine he’d loved reading for most of his life. More than year after submitting the anecdote he finally got the chance to see it in print.

“It is so exciting to see your name in a magazine,” he said.

His Henny Youngman-esque story about his wife continues: “Recently, she was cooking dinner when the smoke detector went off, prompting my three-year-old to announce, ‘Dinner’s ready!’”

That joke at his wife’s expense fetched van Vliet a $100 check from the publisher but he doesn’t expect to spend it on himself.

“I guess since the anecdote poked a little fun of my wife’s cooking I should buy her dinner,” he said.