Family Trouble

Unrivaled by Father John or the Smith Brothers, Lydia Pinkham was for years the most vivid personality in the U. S. medicine chest. Lydia Estes Pinkham died in Lynn, Mass, in 1883. Her prim pictures, however, remained on every package of tier famed Vegetable Compound, and clerks went on answering in her name 100,000 letters per year from women who thought the compound relieved their periodic ills. When the late Edward W. Bok started his crusade against patent medicines, he debunked the post-mortem Pinkham correspondence by publishing in his Ladies' Home Journal a picture of Mrs. Pinkham's tombstone. Pinkham sales soared. Despite other attacks and analyses showing that the only restorative ingredient in Mrs. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound was alcohol (19%, later reduced to 15%), by 1925 the business had mounted to $4,000,000.

Last week a court fight was in progress in Massachusetts to determine after 36 years of Pinkham family squabbling whether control of the business, which still nets $840,000 a year, would remain with the three rich grandsons of Mrs. Pinkham or with her richer daughter and two granddaughters. Each branch of the family has an equal share of the original stock. Few months ago the grandsons, President Arthur Pinkham, Vice President Daniel Pinkham and Secretary Charles Pinkham, got a temporary court order restraining the distaff branch of the family from "interfering in the conduct of the business." Spry, 78-year-old Mrs. Aroline Chase Pinkham Gove, Lydia Pinkham's only living daughter, countered by asking the Supreme Court of Maine, where the company is incorporated, to appoint a receiver for the company, planning to outbid her nephews when the business was put on the block. Last month the first round went to the Pinkham grandsons when a Massachusetts judge decided that their suit for a permanent injunction should be heard first.

Pinkham management has been cleft almost from the beginning, but the family has never before brought its differences to law. According to Lynn legend, Daughter Aroline got a letter in 1879 from her brother Charles, first president of the company, expressing the wish that when he died his wife should be made president. When Charles died in 1900, it was not his wife but Daughter Aroline's husband, William H. Gove, who was chosen. After 20 years, at Cove's death in 1920, the Pinkhams finally got the offices they wanted. But Mrs. Gove as treasurer and her two daughters as assistant treasurer and vice president continued to throw company counsels out of harmony. The final break came over the question of advertising. The Pinkhams wanted a newspaper campaign. The Goves wanted to go on using the old-fashioned testimonial advertising in magazines and car cards. For months neither side has attended a meeting called by the other.

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