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...