Hometown Appetites

In the late summer of 1921, Warren G. Harding was in the White House, Allied forces occupied the Rhineland, the U.S. Congress had just passed a quota on immigration, and Adolf Hitler became head of the Nazi Party. On the heels of World War I, isolationism was in and multiculturalism wasn’t even on the horizon. For Clementine Paddleford, newly arrived in New York City and the proud renter of a room in a boarding house at 520 West 122nd Street, on Morningside Heights north of Columbia University, this meant facing one of Manhattan’s challenges and figuring out how to conquer it: the subway.

There she was, in homemade outfits Jennie had lovingly stitched from patterns Paddleford had picked, summer-weight wool suits, blouses with big bows at the neck, a tote bag at her side loaded with pencils and pads, the picture of a career gal of the day, and a greenhorn at that. As her first act of independence in the city, Paddleford enrolled in graduate-level journalism courses at New York University, despite her proximity to Columbia. These met three evenings a week and required a long subway trip.

Manhattan, Kansas, was not completely homogenous, but it was segregated: The African American section of town consisted of housing along Yuma and Colorado Streets; water fountains and toilets were labeled “Colored.” Minstrel skits of the typical sort were performed while Paddleford was in college. Up to now, she had been exposed to very little but white farm people. For the twenty-two-year-old girl, the culture shock of the subway was immediate. “It’s funny and yet it’s awful,” she wrote to Jennie of her subway riding, “especially when you’re glued in between a Jew, an Italian, Chinaman or Negro.”

Paddleford wasn’t going to give up, although at the beginning things were pretty tough. Paddleford had no job, and knew no one besides her roommate, Pauline Richards, a fellow Kansas State alumna, and Zimm. Her early experience was mostly being “cooped in one room all day long without seeing anyone.” Things with Zimm weren’t quite so easy, either: The young engineer ended up taking an internship in sales, probably for Westinghouse, in the greater Philadelphia area, which left Paddleford alone except for weekends. Her long wistful letters to Jennie and Zimm, written in her longhand, were filled with excruciating detail about her life, for example, how much time she spent ironing or how much she spent on grocery items. Here she was in this big exciting city, but so far her life was a disapointment.

Zimm’s life and times seemed little better. His letters revolved on office details and achingly boring office politics. His every note spoke of longing for her and the times when they could meet again: “You know dear,” he wrote, “that whatever I say, or whatever way it can be twisted to make a different meaning, that the one and only meaning that I could and have ever intended it to have is: that I love you and you only, and that there is no other woman in this world for me.” One letter contained a wedding ring advertisement cut from a magazine. “Look ’em over dear—for as sure as there is a God and Heaven, you are going to have one some day. I will—on that day—be the happiest person in the world,” he wrote.

Boredom and solitude were alleviated when Zimmerman visited. One fall day, they packed a picnic, boarded a ferry across the Hudson River, and then took a streetcar to the Palisades. The next day they visited the “Success,” an Australian ship that transported convicts from England to Australia in 1790, and then toured the Van Cortlandt House, preserved as a museum in the park named after the family. After the mansion, they headed for the Botanical Gardens in Bronx Park. By the time they arrived the gardens were closed, so they hiked through the park instead. “The woods are wonderful here. I have never seen Kansas foliage quite as brilliantly colored,” she wrote. “The leaves fall so soon in Kansas but here they hang on for weeks becoming more beautiful as the season advances.”

Such weekends were blissful, but also reminders of her usually lonesome days. “Sometimes I fairly hate New York,” she wrote Jennie. “How I do wish you could come and live with me after Christmas, we could be so happy I know. If I only had work or classes that took me out among people I would be perfectly content, but all day long I sit here alone in the room.”

A regular job would have given her a place to go, people to befriend, and a dependable paycheck. Both her parents and Zimmerman sent her money, and she was undoubtedly eager to take care of herself. Paddleford applied for a job with The New York Sun, but instead was given a chance to write, on a freelance basis, a series called “The Woman Who Sees.” The assignment was to relate shocking or inspiring incidents. She was paid $8 for each piece published. Most of her work was in the man-bites-dog mode, including, “Girl Saves Her Hat in Subway Crush,” “Phone Booth Used as a Windbreak,” and “Girl Uses a Fake Limp to Get Seat.” Years after, Paddleford confessed that she may have made up tales because of “time constraints,” although she sheepishly added that she “might have seen them.”

Paddleford also wrote book reviews for Administration, a business magazine, and for The Sun and The New York Telegram. She also kept up her Kansas contacts and occasionally filed a piece for The Topeka Daily Capitol and The Wichita Eagle. In addition, a professor at N.Y.U., in whom she periodically confided her career worries, referred her to the office of a Fifth Avenue interior designer, one Mrs. Adler, for whom Paddleford wrote press releases. She also took a job waiting on tables at the Union Theological Seminary—near her apartment—and worked as a babysitter for two wealthy Upper West Side families. At Christmas season, she also took a job as a clerk in the umbrella department at Gimbel’s. That position ended when Paddleford lost her temper at a customer who banged on the counter and shouted “Miss!” at her. “Don’t you ‘miss’ me!” Paddleford replied, opening a large umbrella in the customer’s face. She hated the job and didn’t think much of her co-workers, although she was determined not to let them steal her customers. “I got perfectly sick of swallowing people’s sass and answering questions,” she wrote her mother. “It would kill me . . . if I ever had to do something of the kind for a living.” Despite all, she nearly went broke paying for N.Y.U. classes and the rent and groceries. She worried constantly. “Do you know I doubt if I can ever make enough to live,” she wrote Jennie.

But Paddleford was also discovering the duality that E. B. White later described as New York’s “queer prizes”—the gift of loneliness came with the gift of privacy. “In New York you know so few people,” Paddleford wrote her mother, “one can do almost what they please and no one is the wiser.” She also began to fall in love with some places, especially the Bowery. One warm spring afternoon, she and a friend hit the shops of antiques and jumble. She bought a brass kettle, a cream pitcher, a sugar bowl, and a serving tray. She said she was attracted to brass because it was “considered aristocratic to have sitting around.”

The Lower East Side, Little Italy, and Chinatown also captivated her. “There is something about the tall buildings, the hurrying cold indifferent crowds, the hurdy gurdy music, the sticky smells that come up from dark uncertain looking basements, that appeals to me,” she wrote. “Sometimes I hate it, everything, down to the last banana skin and stray cat, but when I think of leaving it, all of the racket, the dirt, the beauty and ugliness all mixed in so comfortably together, I almost revolt at the thought.”

Some time before the summer of 1922, Zimmerman had finished his internship in Philadelphia and his company placed him in a job in the area of South Bend, Indiana, and Chicago. At the same time, Paddleford’s roommate, Pauline Richards, was planning a move back to Kansas. Paddleford was despondent: “For two days I have done nothing except sit down, stand up, and walk the floor, thinking, thinking,” she wrote.

Although she was offered a job at a small local newspaper in upstate New York, Paddleford’s pride kept her from taking it. She knew she could land a bigger and better position. She constantly chased leads, bombarding editors with letters, sometimes lying in wait for them at their offices. “I will never come back to Kansas without a job,” she swore.

She arranged to meet some editors to discuss freelance assignments while in Chicago. With apparent ease, she landed a spot as a feature writer for the Agricultural News Service and as an editor of the Milk Market Reporter. Within two weeks, she was out of 122nd Street and had moved her belongings to Chicago by train. Her first room was another boarding house, this at 53 East Superior Street.

Paddleford found her new city more fulfilling, both professionally and personally. Then came an ironic turn. Although Zimmerman had been living in the area, he had just accepted a job with Westinghouse in Houston, back in Texas. “No one likes to be known as a quitter,” he wrote to Paddleford, “but god knows it is hard to stay here—especially when you are used to a god’s bounty like the West.” Zimmerman was clear about Paddleford’s dreams for herself. “I know that you are going to be a well known writer some day—and I am not saying this in a joking tone either dear,” he wrote. “You should at least know I don’t kid you on your profession any more?” So despite his departure, he encouraged his love to take the Chicago chance.

Landing in Chicago meant Paddleford got a welcome opportunity to meet young women in journalism. New York may have had its own network of established women reporters and editors, but Paddleford didn’t get to meet them because she didn’t have a job. In Chicago, it was easier to find good contacts. One was Margery Currey, and when Paddleford met her, opportunities opened up. Currey was a society editor for The Chicago Tribune and part of the so-called Chicago Renaissance, which supported and guided writers, particularly women. Currey knew other influential literary figures, including Margaret Anderson, a feminist, the founder of the literary magazine The Little Review, which published early works by Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce. She was also friends with Edith Wyatt, a noted Progressive, social activist, and co-founder of Poetry magazine, and the playwright Susan Glaspell, co-founder of the Provincetown Players.

Currey took Paddleford under her wing. Her parties, which constituted a salon, enfolded Ben Hecht, Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandburg, and Maxwell Bodenheim. Currey realized that women in journalism needed a sanctuary, and she also opened her home to members of the Theta Sigma Phi, which was styled the national fraternity for women in journalism. Paddleford had joined this organization in college. Theta Sigma Phi’s members in Chicago had a residence at 1215 Astor Street. In a renovated Chinese laundry on Stony Island Avenue near the University of Chicago, Currey lived and was host to literary readings by these young female writers. The gatherings included Paddleford as well as her roommates Tracy Samuels, a lively advertising copy-writer, and Marcelle Laval, a writer of children’s books. With the support of her Theta Sigma Phi sisters, Paddleford felt part of a community whose members were intent on helping each other. These bonds proved not only useful but enduring; the friendships Paddleford forged during these days would be the most important of her life.

And they weren’t only with women. She resumed building a retinue of male escorts. These men squired her around, took her to dinner, dancing, and to the theater. Some of them were fellow Kansans, others new professional contacts. Some helped her find stories, provided introductions, and coached her for interviews. Paddleford’s heart may have been with Zimm, but practicality meant she needed to meet other men.

Soon after arriving, Paddleford found better employment. While continuing as editor for the Milk Market Reporter, she took a job with the Hayes-Loeb Company, a publicity organization, for $35 a week. After her bosses grasped how fast Paddleford could crank out copy, the in-box on her desk overflowed with account files. She wrote promotional material for the Sears, Roebuck Agricultural Foundation; Sears, Roebuck’s radio station WLS, the Real Silk Hosiery Mills, Blue Valley Creamery, Marshall Field, Montgomery Ward, and Phoenix Laboratories. She did ghostwriting for Samuel R. Guard, director of the Sears Foundation. She took assignments to write agricultural and economic articles for The Country Gentleman, The Field Illustrated, and The Farm Journal.

In early 1923, Guard sent Paddleford to cover hearings in a dispute between the Federal Trade Commission and the United States Steel Corporation; part of an epic fight over price-fixing. These hearings gave Paddleford insight into the plight of the American farmer, to which she was already naturally sensitive. She saw that price fixing kept farmers strapped while the steel industry profited.

Meantime, Zimmerman was getting intense about marriage and wanted Paddleford to relocate. Finally, she yielded on one point; on July 10, 1923, at a small congregational church in Chicago, Paddleford married Lloyd David Zimmerman. Whatever either side’s motive for this austere wedding, it wasn’t to obtain religious or state sanction to go to bed together. The records show they had spent many nights in the same hotel rooms in a couple of states. As for the other possibility, neither was Paddleford pregnant. Married or not, she was also not ready to move to Texas. Zimmerman accepted the terms, and agreed to let Paddleford keep the marriage a secret from everyone, including her mother, who openly adored Zimm. Paddleford clearly believed that she could lose out on career opportunities if she was not perceived as single, and so she continued to date other men despite her marriage. This pained Zimm greatly, but he dated as well, although not as much as she. “I see your point of view in keeping our marriage a secret, see it very clearly,” he wrote to her. Zimm’s hope was that his wife would eventually bow to a conventional home life: “For I know there are not going to be any kiddies to occupy your time and attention for a long time at least—but someday, maybe, who knows?” he wrote.

Paddleford had no intention of leaving a city where she was succeeding, at least not until she saw greener pastures. She was sure she had the stuff to be a great writer, one who could achieve wealth and fame, on her own terms. Although she wrote her mother depicting her happy memories of farm life, she was not going home again. “Coming back won’t get me anywhere in this little game of being a journalist,” she wrote.

Of the publicity accounts Paddleford handled, she enjoyed the Sears work best. Radio station WLS—the call letters stood for World’s Largest Store—was housed in the Sherman House Hotel in the Loop. Radio was a new medium, and Paddleford was on a pioneer team. By early 1924, she had found a place. The announcer George C. Biggar had a weekly broadcast called “Book Farmer,” based on current events in agriculture. Of course, this was Paddleford’s cornfield. She wrote scripts for Biggar with titles like “What the Farmer Wants to Know,” assessing pests and diseases among poultry and sheep after a particularly wet spring.

The research taught Paddleford technical aspects of food production. She was aware this was not creative writing. Of her bosses and listeners she wrote to her parents: “Can’t you just see the looks of disgust they’d waste on my little stories if they knew that a girl with the dance fever was the scientific research department?” However, she covered a wide area, everything from the corn market to the shipping of eggs from China, and the increasingly painful issues of tenant farming and sharecropping. She learned to dig for facts.

Many times, she suggested solutions. Typically, during a seed-corn shortage in 1924, her broadcast, “Boys’ and Girls’ Club to Help Fill Uncle Sam’s Seed Bin,” advised club members on selecting and drying seed corn and counseled them to market their services at one cent an ear. This story was picked up and published in more than one hundred papers. Occasionally, she got to write about food. In the summer of 1924, she wrote a feature responding to women’s dislike of cooking elaborate meals in hot weather. She spun it out, as she would for years: “Hot weather radio menus for the farm dinner are being specially prepared to please the farmer, his wife and the kiddies as they tune in for the regular farm program.”

She treated publicity writing casually, creating articles that were on occasion based only loosely on fact. Sometimes, she confessed to Jennie, the stories were “just blah that I made up out of my head.” If Paddleford felt guilty about this, it did not show. In this apprenticeship, Paddleford found a voice that listeners could relate to. This skill became measurable when she wrote a kiddie show in which two hosts sang, played games, and read nursery rhymes. She described writing with the idea in mind that the hosts were talking to boys and girls “gathered around the living room in the evening with their nightgowns on ready to jump into bed.” With Paddleford’s work, that show’s listenership more than doubled.

This was the era of the flapper, the young women flatchested in skimpy sleeveless tunics that reached only to mid-calf, with bobbed hair, thick black eyeliner, and bright lipstick. In her own way, Paddleford incorporated elements of this style into her own look, one that she refined and adapted for the rest of her life. She wore her thick curly hair just below ear length in a wave to frame her long face and wide-set eyes. She often chose dresses with swirling flares and large bows at the back, and, further adding to the flowing effect, shawls. To this assemblage, she added a large tote bag for paper, pads, pencils, and research materials. Topping it all off often enough was a large wide-brimmed hat. She adored the majesty and pageantry of the look she was cultivating: She obsessed about dress patterns, constantly asking Jennie to make over suits or blouses and add the latest collars or sleeves or linings. She was also an inveterate shopper, always on the lookout for a good deal.

Paddleford’s work was not without adventure. At a Sears exhibition related to the Illinois State Fair, held in Springfield in 1924, the Chicago branch’s textile department, for which Paddleford occasionally worked, mounted a display of prize quilts that Paddleford had borrowed from farm women. Unfortunately, an official had let gambling concessions at the fair go to members of the mob. When the overall management put a halt to it, the hoodlums retaliated by stealing the quilts. The irate artisans found their best work in the mud, and came after Paddleford. Hems flying, she had to flee by running across the rooftops.

About this time, she met Wheeler McMillen, associate editor of Farm & Fireside National Farm Journal, who came to Chicago to make a series of broadcasts at station WLS. On September 8, 1924, McMillen took Paddleford to lunch and asked if she would be interested in a position at Farm & Fireside. The monthly magazine, founded in 1878, was published in New York City by Crowell-Collier. It had grown extremely popular with women, and it featured articles on housekeeping, health, and food. At that moment, McMillen confided, the management was not happy with the household editor and he intended to recommend Paddleford when he got home.

The notion suited Paddleford. It also represented a chance to get back to New York. In addition, it was a top editing position for a woman. It entailed a lot of responsibility, writing, editing, and supervising nine departments. These were beauty, better babies, entertainment, experimental kitchen, fancywork (embroidery, crocheting, and knitting), fashion, features, good citizenship, and interior decoration. Paddleford had no doubt she was ready for this, and followed up with a telegram to McMillen in New York: “Will meet all competition presenting qualifications for the position and can show qualities of experience diligence and sympathetic understanding of field that you will find difficult to duplicate.”

McMillen responded that he had spoken with the editor-in-chief, George Martin, and that Martin wanted samples of her work and a letter. Paddleford pointed out her experience in agricultural subjects, her degree in journalism, and, probably most important to her future editors, her farm background. Martin invited Paddleford for an interview and hired her. This was before the heyday of the so-called “Seven Sisters” of women’s magazines (Better Homes & Gardens, Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Redbook, and Woman’s Day), and although some of those magazines were indeed in existence—McCall’s, for instance, was established in 1880—they had yet to create a successful formula for women’s service issues, and had yet to employ staff that consisted in any major way of women.

Before she left Chicago, she visited her family in Kansas. By this time, Zimmerman’s place in her life had faded some, although she acknowledged to Jennie that she still loved him best. But she took him into account less and less when making plans. Zimmerman nonetheless stayed in touch, trying to persuade his secret wife to move south and start a family. He made one more desperate try. He had compiled four leatherbound volumes of his favorite love poems, some of them that had been meticulously copied in his own hand, such as “Winter Night” by Gervé Baronti (“Oh crystal-studded winter night/Thou’st tranced my mind in rogue delight”), and Longfellow’s “Children’s Hour” (“I have you fast in my fortress/And will not let you depart”). Now, like his heart on a plate, he sent them to his distant wife. It didn’t work. Paddleford was moving even farther away. Although it might have been hard to leave her close band of journalist friends, the Farm & Fireside opportunity was too great to pass up. “I’m my own boss absolutely with all the leeway in the world for trying new things,” she wrote to Jennie.

One person Paddleford thought was right was Nell B. Nichols. Nichols, who had graduated from Kansas State five years before Paddleford, was the home economics expert who tested all of the magazine’s recipes from her home in Topeka. Nichols grew up on a farm and spoke the language. She knew what the farm women thought about while they worked, and she spent time visiting their households. Such work helped establish an intimate relationship between Farm & Fireside and its readers, and created a community of women devoted to Nichols’s advice. Her method was virtually a template for what Paddleford later undertook.

In response to what she found in the field, Nichols wrote about clothes washing, ironing, housecleaning, extermination of household pests, and plumbing: the things that weighed on her readers’ minds. Other articles focused on cooking, with tips on garnishing and serving meals in addition to the recipes. The recipes were mostly for simple dishes like stews, which Nichols tested herself.

Paddleford admired Nichols’s “taking it to the field” approach and pressed her other editors to learn the language of the farm woman, to understand her needs, wants, and desires, and to be able to dispense useful advice on questions ranging from child rearing to interior decoration to cooking. “Personal service builds a reader confidence that nothing can destroy,” Paddleford wrote to Wing.

By 1925, Paddleford was revamping her departments and instituting innovations. For instance, Paddleford discovered that rural women often gloried in their skills as cooks but floundered in interior decorating. She perceived this as an opportunity and took a page from Nichols. Some of Paddleford’s new articles were “Your Friendly Kitchen,” “How to Choose Curtains for Your House,” and “These Come Ready Painted,” a story about decals. Instead of shooting photographs in a studio, she had a photographer accompany her to take shots of the women she interviewed in their own homes.

Paddleford realized that readers were the best sources for an editorial agenda. One Indiana farm woman told Paddleford, “Farm women are developing a good-looks-consciousness.” This proved important in the beauty department, causing a shift in focus from recent college graduates and June brides. Paddleford organized the entertainment pages seasonally. She scheduled articles on a particular holiday for the month before. Readers wrote letters asking where to buy party supplies, how to make place cards, party favors, and much more. Correspondence files show that boys and girls twelve to twenty years old liked the entertainment pages best and wrote long enthusiastic letters.

Lamb Stew

2 pounds lamb shoulder, trimmed of all fat and sinew
and cut into 1½-inch chunks
Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
Boiling water to cover meat

1 medium turnip, diced

1 carrot, diced
1 small onion, diced

1 russet potato, peeled and cut into large dice

Generously season meat with salt and freshly ground black pepper. In a large bowl, toss the meat with the flour.

In a large Dutch oven over medium heat, heat oil and brown meat. When well browned, pour boiling water over meat until nearly ¾ covered. Bring liquid to a simmer and adjust seasoning before covering Dutch oven with parchment paper and then a tight-fitting lid. Over very low heat, keep lamb at a bare simmer until tender, about 1½ hours, or when meat can be cut easily with a spoon. Add turnip, carrot, and onion, and continue to simmer, covered, for 3 to 4 minutes. Add potato and cook until tender, about 6 more minutes. Adjust seasoning.

Yield: 6 servings

In terms of authority alone, the “better babies” section was easiest for Paddleford to align. Founded in 1908 by the Louisiana Congress of Mothers, the National Better Babies Bureau organized baby contests at county, state, and agricultural fairs. Instead of the “beautiful baby” pageants, these were exhibitions of “good teeth, rosy cheeks, and rugged backs.” Thus, babies were judged on their wellness. Despite its resemblance to the judging of livestock, many farm parents liked it. The goal was to educate farm parents, most of whom were distant from good pediatric care, on keeping their children healthy. “Hundreds of mothers were stunned by the first realization that their babies were paying the price of prenatal ignorance,” she wrote. “Fathers came who could raise livestock but whose babies died at an early age or grew up weak and ailing.” Between 1919 and 1925, the magazine’s Better Babies department received more than 62,000 requests for expectant-mother literature alone. Paddleford ran letters of appreciation from mothers and photographs of the children.

One department represented the core of Paddleford’s plans: features. A voracious reader herself, Paddleford believed that women gravitated to articles written by other women. For the feature pages, she wanted articles about women who were community leaders and whose homes were outstanding. She succeeded. Her stories caught the attention of women who opened the magazine because they were about issues that concerned them the most.

After Paddleford got a managerial handle on her job, she wanted to get word of her improvements to readers. She contacted the State Home Demonstration Leaders, an agricultural organization with many branches. Hearing that an editor at Farm & Fireside was interested in the daily farm life of women, members poured letters into Paddleford’s in-box.

For example, T. R. Johnson, director of the News Bureau of Purdue University in Indiana, wrote about two sisters, Essie and Fanny McClure. “They are community leaders, use good methods and are successful farm operators, insofar as any of the farmers have been successful in the last few years,” he wrote. Paddleford told her bosses her intention was to travel, and she wanted to meet the McClures herself. “I’m against stuff hatched from library reading and seasoned with imagination,” she wrote. The two men encouraged Paddleford and said they’d pay her fare.

Paddleford got permission for a thirteen-day exploratory trip. On May 26, 1925, Paddleford left for Chicago. At the Sears, Roebuck store she interviewed twenty-one of the forty department heads, plus the president, the advertising manager, the head of the correspondence department, and the head of the adjustment department. This prodigious work resulted in two articles for Farm & Fireside. One, “In a Mountain of Mail I Found a Mine of the Gold and Brass of Human Nature,” was not only brilliantly titled but also showed the ways letters expose more about the writers than they would dare speak aloud. Paddleford reported that an elderly farmer wrote to the Sears mail order department for an etiquette book. “I don’t like to be taking this up at my age,” he wrote, “but my wife has a shine on our banker.”

She next went to Indiana to visit the fabled McClures. Paddleford was driven along the trim grass-edged lane leading to their Walnut Grove Farm. A white house stood among flower beds and tall walnut trees on land that had been in the McClure family one hundred years. “Hello there!” A woman greeted Paddleford. The reporter found herself looking into eyes just above the barrel of a gleaming shotgun. “Trying to kill a crow. They’re taking all of our young chickens,” explained Fanny McClure, younger of the sisters, about five foot five inches tall in blue overalls.

They ambled to a hog barn where Essie was scrubbing cement pens. “Labor is the biggest problem,” Essie said. “Men don’t like to take orders from women.” The McClures’ plan was to try to keep hired hands for at least part of the year, but even this proved tricky. Paddleford quickly perceived how the women had learned to do for themselves, noting that they handled hay-forks as easily as sewing machines. They cut weeds, sharpened their scythe, harnessed mules, planted and harvested crops, canned produce, fed cattle and hogs, and took rats out of traps. While the sisters finished cleaning the hog house, Paddleford took a ride on Fanny’s beloved Indian pony, Red Cap, while her driver and photographer, B. H. Benson, took photographs.

By the end of her first year at the magazine, she had reorganized the departments in her division, made business contacts across the country, and created a niche for her features. On December 18, 1925, she took a train west for Christmas with the family. But not a vacation: she interviewed eighteen people, visited with Kansas home extension experts, met a few farm women in Missouri, and attended an agricultural conference in LaFayette, Indiana.

In De Soto, Missouri, in the Ozarks, she found two more women farmers, Alice Peck and Anne Fisher, who had a fifty-acre spread. Like the McClures, these two women farmed like men. Peck supervised the dairy herd and orchards while Fisher handled the household and poultry end of the business. Their tractor served as the hired man. Their splendid farm and menagerie of pets were forged into classic Paddleford prose.

This sort of scouting gave her more than material for columns, and from it she got a deep understanding of the working-class American women of her era. These gleanings were first put to use in memos to her bosses, Martin and Wing. Some clue to how these two viewed the windmill they had hired comes in a letter from Wing to Paddleford in early 1926. “Started to say ‘Clem’ but thought it might look too undignified in type. Us editors must cling to our dignity, mustn’t we,” Wing starts out, quickly undermining his reputation for seriousness. In his two-page note he goes on to implore Paddleford to use her contacts at WLS Radio for information for a story on old-time dances and fiddlers. The letter includes some sketches that Farm & Fireside editors Dick Dobson and Russell Lord made of the back of a head with the words “frown from rear” written next to it, and another sketch with a ghastly necktie. “My Gawd the neckties!” Wing breezes on. “The Xmas ties this year were just simply unwearable, seems as though they get worse every year.” Winding up, Wing comes back to his point about the WLS contacts:

Now don’t get me wrong Miss Paddleford (see I’m not drunk because I can still spell your name, fact is haven’t had a drink since, let me see, since last Sunday and then only one, maybe it was three) I’m writing you this looney letter because I just happen to feel that way and because my eyes are hurting me and they don’t hurt so much when I type as when I read because I can more or less type with my eyes shut. I am really serious about this spread idea, and also wishing you a good time and a highly satisfactory New Year.

Paddleford was beginning to be recognized as an expert. In October 1926, she attended an event at the Eastern State Exposition in Springfield, Illinois. Seventy household editors and home demonstrators were at the luncheon. She was among the eight guests asked to make a short presentation. Paddleford confided modestly to Martin and Wing, “I did quite a bit of talking but I’m not sure just what about. It seemed to sound all right.”

Paddleford made time to interact with farm women every day, which was getting easier because of the mail she received. These women told her what they thought about clothes, schools, politics, the homes they wanted, and their dreams for their children. “This daily inpour of letters has taught me more about the woman of the land than I ever learned in the years I spent growing up in a Kansas farm community,” Paddleford wrote.

Given Paddleford’s responsibilities, one would wonder where she had the time to brush her teeth, but she wanted to be a consulting editor for another magazine. She sought the approval of officials at Crowell Publishing to apply for a three-month temporary position as consulting editor to a magazine called Own Your Own Home. Approval was given with the proviso that Paddleford’s name not be used. She was hired at a salary of $35 a week, but before she could assume these tasks, she was called home.

Jennie Paddleford had already been ill for several years, and in October 1926 she had surgery, most likely for stomach cancer. “You were brave to do it all by yourself,” Paddleford telegraphed her mother. Back home, Jennie felt good enough to resume her activities. But in January 1927, she was rushed to the hospital for an unknown emergency, and did not recover. On Monday, January 31, 1927, Jennie died.

The death of her greatest source of inspiration affected Paddleford profoundly, which is apparent in what she wrote. “She is gone but her legacy to me is riches that can neither be bought or sold, and into which the question of money enters not at all,” Paddleford wrote. “We had little cash money, but we didn’t buy our happiness out of the stores. She taught us how to take it firsthand from the farm.” People who later met Paddleford described her as full of inner confidence, and for this Paddleford credited her mother.

Jennie’s death seemed to evoke a heightened ambition in her daughter. Shortly after returning home to New York, she applied for a position with McFadden Publications, which she did not get, but it left her with two letters of reference that she kept all her life. Her backers were Leo C. Moser, copy editor at Albert Frank & Company, and Glenn Hayes, president of Hayes-Loeb Company. Moser had been a classmate and sometime date (often to the particular annoyance of Lloyd Zimmerman) of Paddleford’s at Kansas State, and he had caught up with her later at Farm & Fireside, where he had been an editorial manager. Hayes knew Paddleford when she wrote publicity for his company in Chicago.

Moser said:

I have been acquainted with Miss Paddleford’s work for a period of nearly five years. She is an able writer of both imaginative and fact material, a combination of abilities which I have found rare among women writers. As an editorial manager of a department of the Crowell Publishing Company, moreover, I have been told that she has initiated changes that have resulted in saving very considerable sums for the company.

If you have an opportunity to secure Miss Paddleford’s services for editorial work of any kind, I am sure that you will find that she is conscientious and unusually diligent in her application to the work in hand.

Hayes said:

Miss Clementine Paddleford, whom you inquire about in your letter of the 15th, was in the writer’s employ for the better part of three years, during which time she built up for herself a very enviable reputation. She is a writer of exceptional ability, being able to write to a purpose, as well as anyone I have ever known. Her character is above reproach and she is most punctual and reliable in her duties.

Paddleford blazed on, acting on each idea as it occurred to her. She spent the week of June 20, 1927, in Asheville, North Carolina, at the meeting of the American Home Economics Association. Her objective was new contacts: eleven hundred women from all over the country attended. She held a luncheon for five guests who were important at major corporations and associations such as Kellogg and Kraft. These women would be good sources for years.

In December 1927, Paddleford made her pilgrimage to Kansas. It was the first holiday without Jennie. Perhaps as a result Paddleford spent just three days in Manhattan before hitting the road for work. She visited for two days with Nell Nichols and at each stop met with agricultural office extension workers, attended meetings, and visited farms and kitchens.

By this time she was a member of the American Home Economics Association, Advertising Women of New York, the Woman Pays Club, Pen and Brush Club, American Quill Club, and still the Kansas Authors Club. She visited research laboratories, state universities, and governmental bureaus. She attended all meetings of huge organizations—the Gas Manufacturers Association, and National Electric Light Association, to name two.

After Jennie’s death her memos to Martin and Wing became fewer and her tone of upbeat excitement turned concise and strict. She wrote a few freelance articles, for The Globe Feeder and Your Home magazine. In both of these, in accord with her arrangement to restrict her real name to Farm & Fireside, her work appeared under the byline “Clementine Haskin.”

Then some vitality returned to Paddleford’s personal life. In 1928, she met a woman who would become a lifelong friend and confidante, Alice C. Nichols, a bubbly, birdlike woman with charisma to spare. Although she was no kin to Nell Nichols, the test kitchen expert for Farm & Fireside, Alice was also a Kansan, born in Liberal in 1905. Like Paddleford, she showed an interest in journalism at a young age, even creating her own newspaper, The Nichols Journal, as a child. After graduating from Kansas State in 1927 with a journalism degree, she worked at The Kingman Herald, in Kingman, Kansas. Russell Lord, an editor at Farm & Fireside, summoned her to New York in 1928, where she started on the mail desk “reading the slush.”

As her travels increased, Paddleford began to stay in touch with her regular correspondents the only way she could—through chatty letters that were copied and sent to everyone. She called them her “form letters.” She also piggybacked assignments, using her Farm & Fireside-sponsored trips to her advantage. For instance, while in California in 1928 she wrote an article for Brighter Homes magazine, a publication that was essentially a promotional vehicle for its publisher, Glidden, maker of what the cover of the magazine said—in very small type—were “the highest quality of paints, varnishes, lacquers and enamels.” This article was about the entertaining style of none other than Clara Bow. “Where a Famous Flapper Folds Her Wings and Rests” has a lead that is pure Paddleford, describing the day’s leading entertainer in a way that every woman in every kitchen could relate to. “Clara Bow isn’t always a flapper,” she wrote. “At home she slips off her flame-colored wings and her screen poses and is just herself.” Paddleford’s description of the Bow manse in Beverly Hills is equally engaging: “You can see it a mile away, its title roof a red blotch, as daring as Clara’s own auburn curls.” Paddleford’s interview with Bow is often hilarious, as Bow admits buying a sea-green refrigerator for the color and a set of red pots to placate her cook before acknowledging that her so-called flair for entertaining was actually all about pleasing “the brutes,” also known as the men in her life. “I don’t know much about cooking,” she told Paddleford, “but I do know a lot about men, and I know a lot about that social function they call a ‘good square meal.’ ”

Paddleford was not always as well received as she apparently was by the queen flapper. For instance, while she was on a trip through Madison, Wisconsin, Abby Lillian Marlatt, a staff member of the College of Agriculture at the University of Wisconsin and an old friend of Jennie’s, invited Paddleford for dinner. It did not go smoothly, as Paddleford reported to her bosses:

[Marlatt] doesn’t approve of me due to the terrible mistake I made of being honest in regard to my training for the job of household editor. She was shocked, I soon discovered, to know that I wasn’t a graduate in Home Economics. I seldom confess the truth, but being an old friend of the family, I banked on a bit of charity in understanding—which I didn’t get. I tried to explain that my job was editing and not specialized writing, that we hire specialists to do the special jobs. But this didn’t appease her in the least and we battled the point for the evening. She says magazines everywhere are making a damn fool mistake not hiring Home Economics trained women for their staffs. I reminded her with considerable joy, that Katherine Fisher, head of the Household Institute for Good Housekeeping, had taught Latin for 15 years before she took her present job. The evening was time well spent for me, as I learned never, never, under any circumstance, to again admit that I haven’t at least a master’s degree in Home Economics. Strange as it seems these Home Economics women can’t tell the difference unless I tell ’em. I’m usually cautious to keep my feet on dry land.

When Paddleford returned home, there was more drama. The great Nell Nichols, now busy raising a child in Topeka, untied her apron strings from Farm & Fireside in December 1928. Paddleford hoped to hire a woman just to test the recipes and take Nichols’s field work for herself. “Instead of one writer providing most of the food and home management articles,” she wrote to Martin, “I hope to get this material from personal interviews with farm women, thus giving hard-boiled copy a human interest slant.” This plan was one that Paddleford would carry forward in every job. Involving real home cooks in the world of food journalism was quickly becoming her mission.