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.
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