Member Since: 6/20/2012
Posts: 8,593
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Betty Crocker NEVER existed
Quote:
When you buy Betty Crocker cake mix, or one of the dozens of other products bearing that name, you obviously don't assume that the company is still run by her, any more than Wendy's is still owned by Wendy. But it's logical to assume that, way back when the company got started, there was some actual lady named Betty Crocker just selling her cookies or whatever, in the same way that at one time Ferrari was just Enzo Ferrari making cars in his garage.
And in fact, Betty Crocker first became famous in the 1920s when she started personally responding to customer questions for the Washburn Crosby Company (which later became General Mills). Her popularity grew so much that in 1924 she got her own radio show and cooking school, and by 1945, she was the second best known woman in America, after the first lady. She also loved sitting for portraits, apparently:
Betty Crocker is a crock of ****. It's not that she no longer exists, as some of you may assume -- it's that she never did. The name was created in 1921 to "personalize responses to consumer inquiries," and her famous signature was chosen from samples submitted by female employees. She was invented by Sam Gale, Washburn Crosby's advertising director, because he didn't think women would take cooking advice from a man.
The made-up name gained so much respect and credibility that the company just went along with it. For the radio show, each station had a different woman to be the voice of "Betty," but all read from a script developed by the home office. As for the portraits, well, this explains how she could look like a 30-something housewife in the '40s and a still-30-something yuppie in the '80s, short of her being Doctor Who.
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Lucia Cole who? 
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