Bill Lane (publisher)

Lane was born November 7, 1919, to Laurence William Lane (1890 – February 20, 1967) and Ruth Bell. His father was known as "Larry", so he was generally called "Bill". In 1928, the family moved from Des Moines, Iowa[1] where Larry Lane was advertising director for the Meredith Corporation (publisher of Better Homes and Gardens magazine) to California.[1] The Lane family owned and published Sunset Magazine.[2] Lane graduated from Palo Alto High School.[3]

Bill Lane attended Pomona College before transferring to Stanford University to study Journalism.[4] He was a member of the Stanford Chaparral. After graduating with a bachelor's degree from Stanford, he joined the US Navy during World War II.[4]

He married Donna Jean Gimbel in 1955, they met while she was working as an interior designer in Chicago.[5][6]

As their father phased himself out of the business, Bill took over the Sunset Magazine publishing and brother Melvin (1922–2007) managed the Sunset Books business.[7]

Lane was the first mayor and one of the founders of Portola Valley, California in 1964.[8] From 1975 to 1976, he served as US Ambassador-at-large and lived in Japan. From 1985 to 1989, he was appointed US Ambassador to Australia and Nauru.[9] Ronald Reagan knew Lane from their membership in the Los Rancheros Vistadores horseback riding club.[10][11]

The Lane publishing business was sold to Time Warner in 1990. In March 1993 he was appointed an honorary officer of the Order of Australia for service to Australian-American relations.[12]

In 1995, Lane was named Conservationist of the Year by the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA).[4]

In 2006, Lane received the American Academy for Park and Recreation Administration's Pugsley Medal in 2006 because of his contributions to parks and conservation with advocacy through his magazine, leadership positions on a host of national and regional boards and advisory committees, and personal philanthropy.[3]

The Lane family were large donors to Stanford University including renovations in 1983 to the Palo Alto Stock Farm Horse Barn[13] and after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, for the reconstruction of the Stanford Memorial Church and other historic campus buildings.[14] In 2005, a donation to Stanford University named the Center for the Study of the North American West department after the Lane family.[15]

The Lanes sponsored an internship program starting in 2002, the Bill and Jean Lane Internship Endowment at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution.[16]

In 2005, Lane and his wife (who graduated from Northwestern University in 1952) funded the Jean Gimbel Lane Prize in Piano Performance.[17] In 2015, an additional $5 million endowment to Northwestern University was announced.[18]

With a large donation to the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum, the Lanes established the Jean and Bill Lane Botanical Library in 1994, a non-lending library focusing on South African, Australian, New Zealand, and California plants.[19][20]

Bill and Jean Lane endowed the Lane Family Lectureship in Environmental Science at Washington State University.[21] The lecture was inaugurated in 1993. With their son, Robert, a 1983 WSU graduate, they also created the Robert Lane Fellowship in Environmental Science to support graduate students studying environmental science at Washington State University.[21]

Bill Lane died on July 31, 2010, at the age of 90.[5] His wife, Jean Lane, died in Portola Valley on 18 November 2017, after a brief illness, at the age of 87.[6] Together they were survived by their three children, two daughters Sharon Louise Lane and Brenda Lane Munks and a son Robert Laurence Lane.[22]

• "The Bill Lane Center for the American West". official web site. Stanford University.
• "Sunset: How to live in the west". official web site. Sunset publishing Corporation.
• "The Lane Family". The Sunset Bibliography. Stanford University.