When he and Calvin Coolidge dedicated his Mountain Lake (Fla.) Sanctuary last year, Edward William-Bok said of its transplanted greenery and bell tower: “Every traveled visitor who sees it now, in its completed state, is immediately reminded of the Taj Mahal, in India and unhesitatingly ranks it with that world-renowned tomb.”
Few realized the full import of that comparison, for none save Mr. Bok’s family and the builders knew that at the Tower’s base lay the donor’s crypt. Last week Calvin Coolidge went back to Mountain Lake and saw Donor Bok interred.
Monuments. In his last days, his countrymen thought of Edward William Bok as a man who had not only left his mark on his time, but had erected monuments and written books to perpetuate and explain his career. His “singing tower,” where the drowsy carillon tintinnabulates at sunset as bony red flamingos fly home ward, was the final gesture of an unusually self-conscious romanticist. Other gestures which followed his retirement in 1919 from the editorship of the Ladies’ Home Journal:
The Philadelphia Orchestra (Bok-backed since 1913).
The Bok Advertising Awards (1923).
The Bok prize of $100,000 for the best essay on how to achieve International peace (1923).
Editorship. When Edward Bok went to the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1889, Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis knew he had hired a crusading editor. Once he enlisted the aid of Dancers Vernon & Irene Castle to help stamp out the pernicious tango, turkey trot, bunny hug, supplanting them with the more sedate polka, gavotte and schottische. Evangelically he tried to keep drinking scenes from the fiction of his publication. He engaged a doctor to give advice to young mothers through the pages of the Journal. Some 90,000 babies were said to have been thus magazine-reared. Of his trials and triumphs while editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal,he writes, in The Americanization of Edward Bok:
“He gave them [the readers] the subjects they asked for but invariably on a slightly higher plane. . . . He always kept ‘a huckleberry or two ahead’ of his readers. . . . He conceived the idea of making familiar to the public the women who were back of the successful men of the day . . . labeled the series ‘Unknown Wives of Great Men’ and ‘Clever Daughters of Clever Men.’ The alliterative titles at once attracted paragraphers; they fell upon them like hungry trout. . . . This is exactly what the editor wanted. . . .
“Meanwhile, in order that the newspapers might be well supplied with barbs for their shafts, he published an entire issue of his magazine written by famous daughters of famous men—Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, President Harrison, Horace Greeley, William M. Thackeray, William Dean Howells, General Sherman, Mr. Gladstone and a score of others. . . . Benjamin Harrison’s articles on ‘This Country of Ours’ appeared successfully in the magazine. . . .”
Boyhood. He enjoyed thinking of himself as a prototype of the Immigrant Boy Who Made Good. Better than the image of himself as a young reporter on the make, or as a budding editor, he liked to conjure up his earliest pictures of himself: A Dutch urchin in funny clothes with little English, running errands for Western Union; a young American-in-the-making and on the make—selling ice water to Brooklyn horsecar patrons.
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