women had
been directly helped by the magazine; it had not remained an inanimate
printed thing, but had become a vital need in the personal lives of its
readers.

So intimate had become this relation, so efficient was the service
rendered, that its readers could not be pried loose from it; where women
were willing and ready, when the domestic pinch came, to let go of other
reading matter, they explained to their husbands or fathers that The
Ladies' Home Journal was a necessity--they did not feel that they could
do without it. The very quality for which the magazine had been held up
to ridicule by the unknowing and unthinking had become, with hundreds of
thousands of women, its source of power and the bulwark of its success.

Bok was beginning to realize the vision which had lured him from New
York: that of putting into the field of American magazines a periodical
that should become such a clearing-house as virtually to make it an
institution.

He felt that, for the present at least, he had sufficiently established
the personal contact with his readers through the more intimate
departments, and decided to devote his efforts to the literary features
of the magazine.

XVII. Eugene Field's Practical Jokes

Eugene Field was one of Edward Bok's close friends and also his despair,
as was likely to be the case with those who were intimate with the
Western poet. One day Field said to Bok: "I am going to make you the
most widely paragraphed man in America." The editor passed the remark
over, but he was to recall it often as his friend set out to make his
boast good.

The fact that Bok was unmarried and the editor of a woman's magazine
appealed strongly to Field's sense of humor. He knew the editor's
opposition to patent medicines, and so he decided to join the two facts
in a paragraph, put on the wire at Chicago, to the effect that the
editor was engaged to be married to Miss Lavinia Pinkham, the
granddaughter of Mrs. Lydia Pinkham, of patent-medicine fame. The
paragraph carefully described Miss Pinkham, the school where she had
been educated, her talents, her wealth, etc. Field was wise enough to
put the paragraph not in his own column in the Chicago News, lest it be
considered in the light of one of his practical jokes, but on the news
page of the paper, and he had it put on the Associated Press wire.

He followed this up a few days later with a paragraph announcing Bok's
arrival at a Boston hotel. Then came a