Paddleford, Clementine

Clementine Paddleford was known as "America's No. 1 Food Editor" for more than three decades. Her career started in Manhattan, Kansas.

Born on a farm in Riley County in 1898, and graduating from Kansas State Agricultural College, Clementine grew up relishing home-cooked food. She introduced regional cooking to America. 

A skilled pilot, she flew across the country to report stories. She was known for her culinary journalism, a go-anywhere, taste-anything, ask-everything kind of reporter who traveled more than 50,000 miles a year in search of stories. By the 1960s she had literally been everywhere, including to the bottom of the sea in a nuclear submarine.

Clementine was well ahead of her time, matched as a regional-food pioneer only by James Beard. Her seminal book, "How America Eats," appeared late in 1960.

Clementine died of pneumonia in 1967. She is buried in the Grandview-Mill Creek-Stockdale Cemetery near Riley, Kansas.

She left her books and papers to Kansas State University. The papers, 363 boxes of them, sat in the university's Hale Library untouched for more than three decades. But money to inventory and organize them was finally made available in 2001, and in 2005 they were opened to scholars, accompanied by a small exhibition. They give a vivid portrait of Ms. Paddleford, her work and what much of the world ate half a century ago.