Books on Tape founder Duvall Hecht dies; won gold medal in Olympics
Duvall Hecht was somewhere between his banking job in Los Angeles and his home in Newport Beach when he realized he’d heard the same song for the third or fourth time. On the news stations, the daily report had grown stale and repetitive. The commercials were numbing and endless.
“It never once seemed like a wacky idea to me,” he said in 2001, shortly after selling his start-up to Random House for an estimated $20 million.A man of varied interests, Hecht died Feb. 10 at his home in Costa Mesa, his wife Ann Marie Rousseau said. He was 91. While in the Marines, he became a fighter jet pilot and, after his discharge, a Pan Am pilot, which he found to be little better than being a bus driver, his wife said.
There were tricks to be learned, though. It could take years to secure rights from publishing houses and the initial recordings were sometimes stilted and difficult to listen to. He began hiring actors to do the readings. There was a bulk factor as well. A recorded reading of Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” was 70 hours long and consisted of 47 90-minute tapes, more than enough to fill a glove compartment.
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