Better Homes & Gardens history

After serving a year as Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of Agriculture, E. T. Meredith returned to his company in 1920 and decided to publish more magazines.

In 1922 the company purchased one magazine, Dairy Farmer, and launched another, Fruit, Garden and Home.

Unable to make a profit until 1927, Fruit, Garden and Home, a magazine similar to Successful Farming for the home and family, had start-up difficulties as well.

Meredith capitalized on the success of Better Homes and Gardens magazine and began publishing the Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book in 1930.

As a means of spurring a lagging construction industry during the Depression, the magazine first sponsored a home-improvement contest in 1933.

It introduced readers to the tossed salad in March 1939 and even poked fun at the concept with a cartoon, which depicted gnomelike creatures floating above a bowl with this playful recipe for the perfect salad: A miser for vinegar, a spendthrift for oil, a sage for salt and a maniac for mixing it.

The visionary ideals of architect David Barrow first were presented in 1947 with a house that had large expanses of glass on the south facade and deep overhangs, long before the concept took off in the '70s and '80s.

By 1965, the company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

In 1978 Meredith began a franchise-operated real estate business under the Better Homes and Gardens name. "It's a natural extension of the product franchise," Meredith chairperson Robert Burnett told Advertising Age.

Better Homes and Gardens led the shelter magazine industry in ad revenues and pages in 1988, offering its advertisers an audience four times the size of its next competitor, according to Marketing and Media Decisions.

To soften the blow of a nationwide advertising slump it felt in its magazines and television stations, Meredith sold its 50 percent interest in the Meredith/Burda printing partnership to R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company of Chicago in 1990.

In 1993 the company faced a challenge in the form of a natural disaster.

The real estate business had grown to include about 700 firms, which owned and operated about 1,300 offices and had 24,000 sales associates by 1994.

The company had 40 such books by 1995 and printed a total of 35 million copies.

By 1996, the company had seven stations, and these contributed more than 40 percent of the firm's profit.

In 1997 the company purchased three more television stations, picking them up for $435 million from First Media Television.