The Sun Never Sets

Reflections on a Western Life

By L. W. “Bill” Lane Jr., Bertrand M. Patenaude

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8511-2

Contents

Introduction: Bill Lane’s Reflections by Kevin Starr………………….viiEditor’s Note……………………………………………………..xxi1 Columbus Day…………………………………………………….12 The Masthead…………………………………………………….333 Sunset Unlimited…………………………………………………594 True West……………………………………………………….915 Ambassador Bill………………………………………………….1216 A Man in Motion………………………………………………….147Epilogue: Promises to Keep………………………………………….167Index of Names…………………………………………………….171

CHAPTER 1

Columbus Day

The Heartland of the Midwest

Some of my earliest memories of growing up in Iowa have to do with thecold. Apart from snowstorms and sledding, I remember ice cream bars, andplenty of them. During that period, my father worked at Meredith PublishingCompany, in Des Moines, publisher of Successful Farming and BetterHomes and Gardens. In the early 1920s Dad was personnel manager, and hehad the company cafeteria as part of his bailiwick.

One day a man came in with a proposition about an ice cream bar. Dadthought maybe he had a good idea, and he talked to my mother about it.She developed a dark chocolate sauce that would freeze, and they cut upfrozen ice cream, dipped it into the sauce, and put a stick in it. Then theyput a wrapper on it. My father organized a little investment group andgot this fellow to agree to syndicate what they named the Eskimo Pie. Youwould sell the wrappers, and of course the franchisee would have to adhereto the recipe and the promotions and advertising and so forth. They nevergot any legal documents to obligate this entrepreneur who came up withthe original concept, but it was my dad’s marketing idea to franchise thesewrappers as a way of controlling the distribution and getting a royalty, becauseyou sold the wrappers.

The dark chocolate was the key food ingredient, and as I say, my mothercame up with the recipe for it. She did the testing in our kitchen where welived, in our house in Des Moines. I remember the testing that went onwhen I was a very small kid, with this group of grown-ups sitting aroundthe table tasting these ice cream bars. I’ve always been interested in icecream bars. I became one of the biggest Häagen-Dazs ice cream bar fansaround. And it all started, at least in part, because of that Eskimo Pie.

This episode, which I now can only hazily recall, exemplifies the kindof collaboration between Mom and Dad that would become a hallmark ofthe Lane family.

My father, Laurence Lane, was born in Horton, Kansas, in 1890. His father,William Earl Lane, died when my dad was two. My father’s mother, EstellaLouise Lane, was from a farming family background in Geneseo and Moline,Illinois. After his father’s death, my father went back with his mother to livewith relatives in northern Illinois.

He and his mother struggled to get by. She had a boardinghouse that Iremember going to as a child in the early 1920s, before we moved to Californiain 1928. Dad had to work for everything, and when he was sixteenhe dropped out of high school in order to take a job. For a time he workedas a hardware salesman, jogging around Minnesota in a horse and buggyselling Keen Kutter knives. He later went back to school and completedhis remaining two years of high school in a single year, in 1913, when heturned twenty-three. He then moved to Iowa with his mother and enrolledat Drake University.

While at Drake, Larry Lane went to work part-time and summers for theMeredith Publishing Company. It was the beginning of a publishing careerthat would last well beyond a half century. At Drake, his normal bent forknowledge was somewhat distracted by a first-class extracurricular interest:the daughter of the university president, Dr. Hill McClelland Bell, whoserved as Drake’s president from 1903 to 1918.

Mom’s background was radically different from Dad’s. Born in Lincoln,Nebraska, she grew up in an academician’s home. Dad was a good student,but Mom was the more natural student. She was a home economics majorand Phi Beta Kappa. Years later, Mom served on Drake’s board of trustees.Their romance and graduation were enhanced during senior year by Mombeing elected “Queen of the May” by the graduating men students, whileDad was elected “Cardinal” by the Women’s League for the annual MayFestival.

Ruth Bell and Larry Lane were married right after graduation, whichhappened to be just at the time that the United States entered the FirstWorld War, in the spring of 1917. Dad joined the army, commissioned asa first lieutenant. Mom accompanied him to Fort Oglethorpe, in Georgia,where he did psychiatric screening for draftees to determine whether theywere capable or qualified for war duty.

After the war, Dad returned to Meredith, where he served as personnelmanager for Successful Farming, a practically oriented, how-to magazine,aimed equally at the Midwestern farming husband and wife. SuccessfulFarming was a regional magazine. It catered to what back then was called”The Heartland of the Midwest,” covering about ten Midwestern states.

Moving up the ladder, Dad then became assistant advertising managerfor Better Homes and Gardens, established by Meredith in 1922 as Fruit, Garden& Home and renamed two years later. Before long, he became advertisingdirector for all the Meredith publications. The flagship was thevery successful Better Homes and Gardens. I have no doubt that my mother’sinspiration and her interests—her love of gardening and food—influencedmy father a great deal, and had a lot to do with his interest in Better Homesand Gardens and the direction it took in the 1920s. The new magazine wasaimed at the home and gardening family, and every article provided an affirmativeanswer to the question “Is it possible to do something as a resultof reading this article?” This was a test that Larry Lane was later to apply tothe articles published in his own magazine.

I was born in an apartment down in the city of Des Moines, but very shortlyafter that my parents built the home on Hickman Road, a dirt and gravelroad outside Des Moines. It was a very small, unpretentious house, wayout in the country back then, and by now long gone. My brother, Mel, wasborn two and a half years later. I associate that house with some Airedaleswe had when I was a small boy. I remember throwing a little Airedale puppyoff the sofa and my brother catching it. At least one of those Airedales grewup in our family, because I can recall a big Airedale in the backseat of ourcar, and my dad instructing me to hang on to it. Of course I did, and whenthe dog jumped out of the car, it took me along with it.

We had a small farm, with a cow, a pig, and some chickens. I had earlyexposure to farm life, and in fact one of my earliest memories is of milkinga cow. Mom had a very extensive vegetable garden. And we had a pony, alittle black pinto named Betty, and a wonderful dog called Cleta, a Germanshepherd that lived to be very old.

I remember going to school, walking along the streetcar tracks leadingout of Des Moines. I went up through the sixth or seventh grade in thesuburb. Memories grow fuzzy, but landmark events help make them vivid.I can’t think of the name of my early grammar school now, but I rememberthe day of Charles Lindbergh’s historic landing of the Spirit of St. Louis inParis. It was May 21, 1927, a Saturday. Mel and I sat in the driveway listeningto telegraph reports sent from Paris by Atlantic cable on earphones ona little squawk box, a forerunner of early radio called a “crystal set.”

Lindbergh’s flight was a benchmark in my interest in aviation, whichbegan very early at a wonderful Iowa State Fair that Mom and Dad took usto, an annual event with lots of exhibits, mostly agriculture, of course. Iremember a big room that was definitely refrigerated because it had life-sizesculptures of a cow, a farmer, and his wife, all sculpted in solid butter. Oneof the major attractions that particular year was a Ford Trimotor plane thatdid a loop. That certainly made a big impression on me.

Given my father’s work, I was heavily exposed to magazines, especiallythose put out by Meredith, a company run like a family by its founder andpresident, Edwin Meredith. From everything I can recall and from what Ilater learned from listening to my father, it was a wonderful place to work.I went with my parents to Christmas parties down at Meredith where thecompany gave away five-pound boxes of candy—five pounds!—to all employees.I remember holding this big, thick box of candy. The family atmosphereat Meredith had a strong influence on Dad, and through him on meand my younger brother, Mel. It would help shape the kind of company hewould soon establish, a company that he, and then Mel and I as his successors,would manage in the coming decades.

Our family did a lot of vacation camping up in Minnesota, once nearLake Minnetonka, so we had a great deal of experience being outdoors andenjoying each other’s company in natural surroundings. We never traveledas a family to New England, to the South, or to Europe. But through Meredith,and through some family connections, we had a steady exposure tolife in the American West.

In the growth years of the Roaring Twenties, Dad traveled aroundthe country setting up sales offices and fulfilling special assignments forMr. Meredith on Better Homes and Gardens and Successful Farming. These assignmentsoften took him west, especially to California, Oregon, and Washington,to drum up advertising. He called on the Raisin Advisory Board,Del Monte, and the Washington Apple Advisory Board, among other foodentities. Down in Los Angeles there were several advertising accounts, includingSouthern California tourism organizations that wanted to promotetourism from the Midwest.

Dad soon learned from his travels and from talking with readers andanalyzing reader letters that the greatest difference in living, and in attitudestowards living, were evident when he crossed the Mississippi andtraveled over the Western states to the Pacific Ocean. The opportunities,as well as the problems, of building, caring for, and enjoying a homeand garden were very different in the Western communities of Salt LakeCity, Pasadena, Palo Alto, and Tacoma from what they were along the DesMoines River.

Dad also observed another major difference between Eastern and WesternAmerica. In the days of train travel, the itinerant businessman usuallysaw a big spread of countryside between destinations in the West. Tripswere longer and many a weekend was spent sightseeing far from home—particularlyin the Far West, where there was such a variety of things to see.The availability of year-round travel and outdoor recreation, fast acceleratingwith the increasing ownership of automobiles, became very apparentto Larry Lane, Corn Belt salesman, as he rode over virtually every mile ofrail line west of the Rockies.

After a business trip, he’d bring home supplies of avocados, oranges,and brussels sprouts to his curious family in Des Moines. These wondershad a magical effect on young boys growing up in Iowa. I was very consciousof our limited supply of fresh vegetables in winter. Mom had a rootcellar in the basement. I would go down into that cold basement when itwas freezing outside, and here were turnips, carrots, potatoes, and otherroot plants you could store in a basement. The possibilities were limited, ofcourse, so my dad’s return from California with, say, a supply of fresh brusselssprouts, was a cause for wonder.

I remember Dad once coming back with a crate of artichokes. Weused to meet his train at the station in Moline, because the train didn’tgo through Des Moines. He walked up with this crate of something veryexotic-looking. At that time, Mom had never seen an artichoke—or if shehad, she certainly had never cooked one. What on earth do you do with anartichoke? Such ingredients were not available in Iowa, so there was no wayto write about them in Better Homes and Gardens, even though the magazinehad a national audience. Still, Mom became intrigued with the possibilitiesof Western cooking.

Anyway, Dad had plenty of opportunity to witness the striking contrastsbetween the Midwest and the West, and not only in winter. Of the thousandsof miles of track that he covered, perhaps none was more significantthan a seventy-one-mile excursion on the Yosemite Valley Railroad. Theyear was 1922. Mr. Meredith invited him along on a ride through the SanJoaquin Valley as the guest of the president of the Southern Pacific Railroad,who provided his private car. Dad loved to recall this trip, and it has becomelegendary in our family.

Mr. Meredith had served as secretary of agriculture under PresidentWoodrow Wilson, and the traveling group included experts on the agriculturaleconomy of the great San Joaquin Valley. As a sidelight, they switchedoff the main line and rattled up the spectacular valley of the Merced Riverto the El Portal Terminal, in the Sierra Nevada foothills and the mountains,where they transferred to a motorized open bus for the drive intoYosemite Valley. The dramatic transition from seacoast to broad valley tohigh mountains in only a few hours’ travel made a lasting impression onDad and convinced him that travel and recreation would, in the advancingage of the automobile, play an increasingly significant role in the lives ofWestern families.

Westward Ho!

It wasn’t long before Mom, Mel, and I got to see the magical West for ourselves,as our family branched out to the coast. My mother’s father had gottendiabetes and retired as president of Drake University in 1918, and he andGrandma Bell and Mom’s four brothers moved to Southern California, toLos Angeles, and a house off Wilshire Boulevard in 1919, the year I was born.

This move west was hardly an unusual phenomenon. Midwesternersmigrated to Southern California in large numbers in the early years of thetwentieth century. Land was subdivided and was sold very cheap to getthe population to move out to the West in order to develop a consumerbase for agriculture and for other business. Iowans certainly did theirpart. For a time, Long Beach was informally known as “Little Iowa” and”Iowa-by-the-Sea.”

The Southern Pacific Railroad had a tremendousvested interest in this. Synonymouswith the West in 1898, the S.P. was then themajor transportation system, landholder,Washington lobbyist, and, by all odds, theWest’s greatest booster for agricultural, industrial,and tourism development. For overthree decades, the “Big Four” of Huntington,Stanford, Hopkins, and Crocker pyramidedan empire that had no peer west of the GreatDivide and few in the entire country. Desiringa publication to serve as the voice of thatempire, the Southern Pacific created Sunsetmagazine in honor of its crack overlandtrain, operating between New Orleans andLos Angeles, the Sunset Limited. It still operatestoday.

Founded in 1898, Sunset had an explicitcreed: “Its aims are the presentation, in aconvenient form, of information concerning the great states of California,Oregon, Nevada, Texas, Louisiana, and the territories of Arizona and NewMexico—a rich and inexhaustible field over which the dawn of future commercialand industrial importance is just breaking.” The Southern Pacificused the pages of Sunset to lure people, especially those east of the Mississippi,to come west and buy land. Sunset was in part a society magazine,featuring articles about natural wonders like Yosemite but also chatty storiesfrom places like Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, and Paso Robles. The magazine offerednews about mining and farming, as well as poetry and jokes, always inthe spirit of the Sunset motto: “Publicity for the attractions and advantagesof the Western Empire.”

Sunset was based in San Francisco, and published articles about thecity’s April 1906 earthquake and the rapid recovery in the years afterward.No natural disaster could dampen the enthusiasm for the migration to theWest. The Sunset issues of these years, printed on the Southern Pacific’s ownpresses, were filled with advertisements for nearly every Western countyand irrigation district, wooing settlers to a land where everyone could strikeit rich and have an orange tree and a palm tree in the front yard as well.In the April 1910 issue, land in the Fresno area—”California’s Valley of theNile”—was advertised at $40 to $125 an acre, with a small cash paymentand the balance to be paid over four years.

These were the years when the Western states, and particularly California,experienced some of the largest percentage gains in population everrecorded. Many of the new Westerners were enticed here by the seductivepages of Sunset. Most of the newcomers crossed the plains and mountainsby train. Many arrived by ship, and the S.P. had some of that action, too,as it controlled a major steamship line with connections with Eastern andworld ports, including Hawaii.
(Continues…)Excerpted from The Sun Never Sets by L. W. “Bill” Lane Jr., Bertrand M. Patenaude. Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.