Lydia Loses

Last week a Portland, Maine court decision brought temporary relief to the family of famed Medicine Woman Lydia Estes Pinkham. The court dismissed her granddaughter's bill in equity seeking to place the Lydia E. Pinkham Medicine Co. in receivership.

When Isaac Pinkham lost his shirt in the 1873 panic, his wife began selling a mysterious, home-brewed potion she had long given away to distraught friends. The potion soon overflowed into a national panacea for all kinds of female complaints. After Lydia died, Aroline Pinkham Gove and Charles Pinkham, each with a 50% share of their mother's business, kept her face enshrined on every package, signed her name in answering 100,000 letters a year from grateful or suffering women. By last year Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound had netted Lydia and descendants well over $10,000,000.

But Lydia's face and name could not keep the descendants at peace. Upon the death of President Charles Pinkham, Aroline made it clear that the Goves would now run the medicine show. Finding himself patriarch of the Pinkham branch while but a sophomore at Brown, Arthur Pinkham, son of Charles, was hopping mad.

Since all advertisements advised readers to write "Mrs. Pinkham," since his mother was the only Mrs. Pinkham then living, Arthur had the post office send the mail to his home. He and his mother concocted a new vegetable compound, began selling it in competition with Lydia's. The Goves took him into the business.

By the middle '20s, Arthur was president and Aroline had passed on Gove leadership to her daughter Lydia, a tall (6 ft. 2 in.), big-boned, scrappy spinster who became the Scarlett O'Hara of patent medicines. Lydia was impatient with Pinkham advertising. She wanted to pay out over 50% of gross sales for old-fashioned testimonial advertising. Arthur and his brothers (Vice President Daniel, Secretary Charles) wanted a more sophisticated modern campaign with expenditures not over 30%. With the board of directors deadlocked (three Pinkhams, three Goves), Lydia locked company securities in a safe deposit box, ran off with the key, refused to attend directors' meetings--where unanimous agreement was required for major moves. Daniel said she was determined to "run the business or ruin it."

In 1936, as sales fell and advertising appropriations became a trickle, the Pinkham brothers got an injunction restraining the distaff side from "interfering in the conduct of the business." But Lydia was not to be restrained. She pursued a petition for receivership, charged Arthur with mismanagement. Far richer than the Pinkhams, Lydia knew full well she could outbid them should the corporation be placed on the block.

After four years of bitter litigation, Justice Sidney St. Felix Thaxter last week sustained the Pinkhams, chastized Lydia, saw no need to appoint a receiver. Said he: "On the whole, the President seems to me to have acted with restraint under great provocation. . . . We are reminded that there is no war like a civil war and no feud like a family feud."

Meanwhile the Pinkhams went back to work. With current assets over $1,000,00, liabilities under $100,000, the company had recovered the ground lost in unadvertised 1935-36, leaped ahead 50% over 1939 in the past six months. This was done in spite of the fact that during the past 40 years the pure food & drug laws, the Federal Trade Commission, the American Medical Association have forced the company to water down its once extravagant claims to a pompous nothingness. Current label: "Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound is Recommended as a Vegetable Tonic in Conditions for which this Preparation is Adapted." As for Lydia Gove, whose interests also include a $250,000 investment in the Howard Johnson ice cream & restaurant chain, her feud with the Pinkhams is not necessarily over. Her probable next move: an appeal to the full bench of Maine's Supreme Court.

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