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    The Sun Never Sets: Reflections on a Western Life
    The Sun Never Sets: Reflections on a Western Life
    The Sun Never Sets: Reflections on a Western Life
    Ebook316 pages3 hours

    The Sun Never Sets: Reflections on a Western Life

    By L.W. "Bill" Lane, Jr.

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    About this ebook

    The Sun Never Sets tells the extraordinary story of L.W. "Bill" Lane, Jr., longtime publisher of Sunset magazine, pioneering environmentalist, and U.S. ambassador. Written with Stanford historian Bertrand Patenaude, this fascinating memoir traces Sunset's profound impact on a new generation of Americans seeking opportunity and adventure in the great American West. Bill Lane was a Californian whose life spanned a vital period of the state's emergence as the embodiment (or symbol) of the country's aspirations. His recollections offer readers a rich slice of the history of California and the West in the 20th century. Recounting his boyhood move from Iowa to California after his father purchased Sunset magazine in 1928, and his subsequent rise through the ranks of Sunset, Bill Lane's memoir evokes the American West that his magazine helped to shape. It illuminates the sources of Sunset's canny appeal and its manifold influence in the four major editorial fields it covered—travel, home, gardening, and cooking—while taking readers behind the scenes of American magazine publishing in the 20th century. The Sun Never Sets also reveals the evolution of Bill Lane's views and roles as an influential environmentalist and conservationist with strong connections to the national and California state parks, and it recounts his two stints as U.S. ambassador: in Japan in the 1970s, and in Australia in the 1980s. This memoir will especially appeal to readers interested in the history of the American West, environmental conservation and preservation, and publishing.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStanford General Books
    Release dateMay 8, 2013
    ISBN9780804785648
    The Sun Never Sets: Reflections on a Western Life

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      Book preview

      The Sun Never Sets - L.W. "Bill" Lane, Jr.

      Chapter 1

      Columbus Day

      The Heartland of the Midwest

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

      One day a man came in with a proposition about an ice cream bar. Dad thought 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 up frozen ice cream, dipped it into the sauce, and put a stick in it. Then they put a wrapper on it. My father organized a little investment group and got this fellow to agree to syndicate what they named the Eskimo Pie. You would sell the wrappers, and of course the franchisee would have to adhere to the recipe and the promotions and advertising and so forth. They never got any legal documents to obligate this entrepreneur who came up with the original concept, but it was my dad’s marketing idea to franchise these wrappers as a way of controlling the distribution and getting a royalty, because you sold the wrappers.

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

      This episode, which I now can only hazily recall, exemplifies the kind of collaboration between Mom and Dad that would become a hallmark of the 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, Estella Louise 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 live with relatives in northern

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