The Press: Best Man in the Business

In 1903 a grey-eyed, schoolmarmish New England girl named Gertrude Battles Lane spent her last $10 to get from Boston to Manhattan where, on the strength of her experience as stenographer and part-time editor of the puny Boston Beacon, she got a job with the Woman's Home Companion at $18 a week. Last week Gertrude Lane died, a late-fiftyish spinster, one of the few great women editors* in the U.S., a vice president of Crowell-Collier Publishing Co., and although she had never asked for a raise, earning $52,000 a year.

Editor-in-chief of the Woman's...