Exercising her artistic talents, Jean poses across from a tug in Duluth.
It seems a little cheeky for a photographer to rearrange the home of the editor in chief of Better Homes and Gardens magazine. After all, some 35 million people take their cues to better living each month from the world’s largest-circulation family magazine directed by Jean LemMon.
Yet on a gray muffled morning in her Lake Superior shoreside home, Jean is being asked by photographer Andy Lyons if her corner arrangement beneath a wall-sized Americana portrait in muted blues might be better if this went there and that went …
Jean is far from offended. She has suggestions of her own. She and Andy have done this a hundred times, and Jean trusts both his judgment and his camera work. That’s why whenever Jean needs a lakeside portrait for her monthly “between friends” column, Andy travels up to Duluth, Minnesota, from Des Moines, Iowa, the headquarters of the multi-million dollar Meredith Corporation that publishes Better Homes and Gardens.
This day, Jean and Andy had scheduled a kayak shoot on the shore near her home, where she often dips a paddle into the sweetwater sea. Lake Superior, thanks to a misty fog hugging the shoreline, scheduled instead this cozy shoot in Jean’s living room. As they experiment with just the right pose and placement, the mound of slightly crumpled Polaroid test snapshots rapidly grows on the wooden table beside Andy. The picture must be just right.
For those in the know, a glance behind the editor in those monthly Better Homes and Gardens portraits often reveals the Lake Superior region: Jean sitting amid the floral blooms of Brighton Beach; Jean with a sketch pad across from a moored tug; a be-jacketed Jean at a Duluth marina; Jean in a Canal Park antique shop; Jean holding a warm mug at the counter in the Blue Heron Trading Co. in the DeWitt-Seitz Marketplace.
Andy Lyons and Jean LemMon work comfortably after hundreds of photo shoots together.
The scenery behind the editor is appropriate. Jean LemMon says that her Lake Superior-area upbringing is behind many of the choices she makes for the magazine. It’s made her practical, resourceful and self-sufficient.
“It’s part of who we are as northern Minnesotans. We’re just tougher. If you can survive a Duluth winter, then you can survive just about anything!”
Jean LemMon, nee Holmstrand in Proctor, Minnesota, probably needs to be a little bit tough as the 12th editor and the only woman ever at the helm of the 77-year-old family living magazine. The magazine has a new look and direction since she took over in 1993.
“I think being a female and rooted in design makes a whole lot of difference,” Jean says. “I think the magazine is just prettier now. It’s more practical.” It’s also more comfortable and more unashamedly emotional.
With subscription renewals increasing – an editor’s report card, by Jean’s measure – male readership is also at about 22 percent. Jean attributes the interest, in part, to more active home roles for men.
Being tough and smart (she’s a member of Mensa International), Jean is not fazed by the estimate that 1 in 5 American adults reads her magazine each month. She knows that she and her staff of 50 have plenty to offer them.
As editor in chief, she oversees virtually every aspect of Better Homes and Gardens magazine production as well as its television version, its web site and the “baby” publications such as the new Hometown Cooking that debuted last fall. She attends trade shows, evaluates Better Homes and Gardens books after they are published and remains aware of all of the projects and products connected to “Better Homes and Gardens,” which is a brand name as well as a magazine. She constantly seems to travel around the country, but she also knows when to spend some time in Duluth. The magazine staff then sends what needs her oversight. It’s a luxury earned.
Jean’s confidence and skills developed not far from Lake Superior in a farm home near Proctor. She believes her rural, lake region childhood made her a better planner (trips to the store were rare).
“I learned an awful lot of skills. Proctor has been a little jewel to me. I probably took too much for granted … no locked doors and I’ve just always been connected to nature in some way.… I used to ride a horse around where Spirit Mountain ski trails are now.”
The effects of Lake Superior and this northern clime also teach that some things are out of a person’s control and teach flexibility … like when to take photos indoors and leave the kayaking shots for later. As he sets up shots, Andy comfortably cautions that Jean’s easy acquiescence to some of his requests should not be mistaken for her taking her hands off the wheel. Rest assured, he assures, Jean imprints her wishes on the magazine.
Jean’s mother, who at 91 still resides in Proctor, wrote children’s stories – excellently written children’s stories, says her editor offspring. “If I turned out to be a writer, I got that from her.”
Jean’s father worked at Interlake Iron in Duluth. She remembers that he once blunted the edges of Halloway sucker sticks so that Jean’s grandmother could teach her a crucial skill: “I learned to knit, in Norwegian, on two sucker sticks.”
She remembers, too, one phrase in Finnish that her mother made her memorize before her first dance in nearby Esko, a predominantly Finnish community. Jean can still rattle off, perhaps with a Norwegian accent, a pretty believable sounding: “My mother says I have to be home by midnight.”
After Jean earned an art degree with a minor in English at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, she got through the back door to journalism when a local television station started its news program and needed new sets. “When TV came, I was the only scenic designer in captivity.”
She would later even do a stint in New York City – three unemployed months that ended when she asked herself: “Do you want to live in New York so badly that you’re willing to give up who you are and what you do?”
Jean’s career with Meredith Corporation began in 1961 when she answered an ad in the Minneapolis Sunday newspaper simply stating “wanted, a writer” with no publication listed. She applied and joined the home furnishings and design department at Better Homes and Gardens. Over the years, she’s worked for Meredith as a free-lance writer, a designer and an editor. In 1986, she became editor in chief at Country Home magazine and its circulation grew to 1 million during her tenure.
Now as head of the larger circulation Better Homes and Gardens, Jean has developed a driving philosophy of life … actually a philosophy of driving in life, which she does with regularity with her cat between her home on the northern outskirts of Des Moines and her home in Duluth.
“What’s in between is 400 miles of what I consider vehicular meditation,” Jean says, adding, “Any place you can drive to is not too far away.”
Jean decided early that she didn’t want to be too far away from Lake Superior. While the Iowans’ Midwestern values and welcoming ways mirror her northern Minnesota roots, there is one thing her “other” state just can’t provide. “You can’t grow up around Lake Superior without feeling … landlocked when plunked in the middle of Iowa.”
Each of her better homes and gardens has things she loves.
In Des Moines especially, her love of gardening can be more fully explored with a milder climate. (“I’m basically a gardener,” she says.) Plus, the gardening season starts about three weeks earlier than at her Minnesota home.
In Duluth, her modest home reflects her childhood roots – and surprised her neighbors, Jean confides, who thought the editor of Better Homes and Gardens would surely build enormous, imposing additions. She prefers to keep a house’s personality intact.
Decorated in softer colors, the house is tasteful and airy, but exceedingly comfortable. The fabric on the sofa is durable as well as pretty. So is the light-colored carpet. Doors in the back bedrooms open to a back yard of lush mossy greenery and gardens. The wooden porch in front and the wooden deck in back provide places to sit outside.
Jean LemMon feels at home beside the lake in Duluth, Minnesota, or in Des Moines, Iowa, where she works.
The easy-care house – and the home owner – encourage an exchange between outside and inside without the need to scold about upkeep (the best and only atmosphere for a lakeside home). Jean loves antique shopping – some Duluth antique shop owners recognize her on sight – and “perfect” pieces like a long, worn bench fit, well, perfectly into the house. A basket of knitting and yarn here, a crocheted coverlet tilted there … and it becomes picture perfect (despite photographer Andy’s need to tweak it).
While her position might allow a bit of indulgence with an antique or three, Jean says she’s careful to make the magazine reflect readers’ budgets. “I’m very careful that nothing that goes into the magazine is unaffordable.”
She also wants it to reflect the readers’ interests and lifestyles. “I won’t stand for recipes that call for 35 steps and dirty every dish in the kitchen,” she says firmly, as if that question has come up in the past.
“Better Homes and Gardens has the most average reader in the world.… We’re a home and family service magazine,” she says. For the magazine’s 75th anniversary a couple of years ago, Jean looked back through the years and saw vividly the changes in American lifestyles.
While the magazine catered in the early years to women who grew up as homemakers with gardens of their own and passed down culinary skills, Jean says the magazine no longer takes for granted any base knowledge with its youngest readers.
“These are kids who need help, too, because they are kids of working mothers,” she says. So articles are “pretty darn basic,” meeting Jean’s criteria that stories “inform, inspire and instruct.”
As to the raising of her own family during those busy career years, Jean says she was recently paid a high compliment by her daughter. “I never had the feeling you worked,” Jean quotes her only child.
In her chosen career (or the career that chose her), Jean is satisfied. “I don’t have any unfulfilled dreams at this moment professionally,” she says. “A national career in a regional area; you can’t ask for more than that.”
That’s not to say that a few dreams didn’t go unfulfilled. Picture Jean as a professional dancer or a professional figure skater. Back as a youngster, when she pictured it herself, the spirit was willing, but the legs seemed a tad too short, Jean admits. “Those are things I would have loved, but wasn’t exactly qualified.”
“I’m basically a gardener,” says the Editor of Better Homes and Gardens, happy among the blossoms on Brighton Beach in Duluth.
When she retires (which she has “not even contemplated”), Jean will rekindle her music and painting.
“I want to just sort of dust off the piano and air out the clarinet,” says Jean, a member of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.
She won’t do any professional writing or editing: “When I unplug the laptop the last time here, that’s it.”
And she won’t paint anything too large to pack in the car; Jean intends to maintain the plural “homes” and “gardens” with her two Midwestern households.
Giving up Lake Superior, even for a salty coast, is not an option.
“I only know that lake has spoiled me for oceans. I saw it first,” she says, also firmly. “I just think this one has such character about it. The south shore is softer, the north shore rocky and craggy.… This lake means more to me. It’s inspiration and therapist.
“I love it where you can hear the fog horn.”
Even if it means accepting an afternoon indoors with a sweetly cheeky photographer, there’s just too much to give up, Jean believes.
“This lake has so many different moods. I am experiencing them all, little by little.”
Sometimes the topics of Jean LemMon’s monthly columns involve her home or history near Lake Superior. In this June 1998 “between friends” column, she talks about her childhood home.
When does a house become a home? When you’ve moved your furniture in? When you’ve spent your first night there? Cooked your first meal? I happen to think it becomes “home” whenever you’ve put your personal stamp on it. If that’s true, the house shown behind me was stamped from the very beginning because my folks built it themselves, board by board. Still the conversion from house to home wasn’t really complete until my mother added her special touches. She was the wallpaper hanger and the curtain maker. She filled the house with smells of apple pie and such touches of beauty as hand-crocheted edging on our pillowcases. It was she who spooned out the cough syrup and helped with the homework. And it was she who taught me what homemaking is all about – that it’s more than what you do, it’s how much you care.
My design and journalism skills were learned at school. But it’s what I learned at home that really paved the way for my editing Better Homes and Gardens magazine. Here, all of us believe houses are more than structures, families are more important than anything else in the world and caring for the people we love is life’s greatest responsibility as well as its greatest joy.
This is the June my mother turns 90. Our old home now shelters another young couple raising their family. Life goes on. Learning goes on. I thank you, Mom, for both.
– reprinted with permission from Better Homes and Gardens
The resemblance is remarkable!
Jean LemMon’s picture is seen by more than 35 million people each month in her “between friends” column in Better Homes and Gardens magazine. So it’s no wonder that when the Proctor, Minnesota, native spends time back on the home shores, a few folks who didn’t grow up with her still recognize her. The responses of those who approach Jean usually run in three categories: “Are you the editor of Better Homes and Gardens?” or “You are the editor of Better Homes and Gardens!” or Jean’s personal favorite, “Has anyone told you you look remarkably like the editor of Better Homes and Gardens?”