Betty Crocker

The original Betty Crocker was (big surprise) a man -- an ad man named Samuel Gale, who invented the handle so he wouldn't have to sign his own name on letters back to women seeking baking advice. That little morsel is recounted in a new book called Finding Betty Crocker, by Susan Marks, and reviewed by Joanne Kaufman in The Wall Street Journal (3/25/05). Samuel picked the first-name "Betty" because it "sounded cheery, wholesome and folksy" and the surname "Crocker" in honor of "William G. Crocker, a recently retired and much loved" director of Washburn Crosby (now known as General Mills). And what began as "a tidy little signature at the bottom of a page" soon grew into a full-blown "persona: a woman who could field questions with equal assurance about a marriage that had gone flat or a bread that refused to rise."

It wasn't long before Betty Crocker had a voice to go with her name -- the voice of home economist Marjorie Child Husted, "who would channel the first lady of food for two decades" on an NBC radio network show, "for two decades ... helping stave off competition from such Betty wannabees as the mythical Mary Alden for Quaker Enriched Flour; Ann Page for A&P stores; and Kay Kellogg of for Kellogg Cereals." Betty later showed up in movies and on television (played by Adelaide Hawley). Betty's first "portrait" was created in 1936, created by "the popular illustrator Neysa McMein," who gave her "a fine Nordic brow and shape of skull, a jaw of slightly Slavic resolution and features that might be claimed contentedly by various European groups -- eyes Irish: nose classic Roman -- the perfect composite of the twentieth century American woman." Despite these obvious fabrications, Americans -- adults; women and men -- "seemed to buy into Betty cook, line and sinker."

As Susan Marks writes: "Brand loyalty was a lucrative proposition ... and Washburn Crosby had much to gain by keeping Betty's secret ... The only admission made on the air was that Betty Crocker did not do the recipe testing alone, but rather in the company of her growing Home Service staff. It's reasonable to speculate that most listeners genuinely believed in Betty Crocker." She actually received "countless marriage proposals from touchingly gullible male fans." It was, as Joanne Kaufman observes, "a different -- perhaps palmier -- era in our consumer culture, one built around a cheery domesticity, a culture free of irony, to say nothing of undue concern about carbs and trans-fats." Whether Betty Crocker still has any true believers is doubtful, but General Mills continues to perpetuate the myth: "Currently, Betty's image -- a little Latina, a little soccer mom -- appears on her web site, bettycrocker.com, in cookbooks and in the syndicated newspaper column, "Ask Betty." Oddly, she does seem to have disappeared from product packaging.

Taken from Reveries “Cool News” weekday letter.