Welcome to the History Tricks, where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental.

Welcome to the mini-cast. Today we have two subjects. We have all the dirt you ever wanted to know on Betty Crocker,

that famous 50s icon, and we have details on how to enter our giveaway. It's our first giveaway. It's very exciting.

So let's just begin with Betty Crocker. But because she is iconic, I mean we've talked about our 50s housewife podcast about the convenience foods of the 50s, and she is definitely associated with that era.

So from around the 1920s, there was this new marketing phenomenon known as the corporate character. So many companies had them. They were also called live trade marks.

They were meant to be friends of your customer, to put a personal face on a corporate food stuff, because it really hadn't happened that much before. Food was food, and Apple was just an Apple.

And so Betty Crocker was created by a company called Gold Metal Flower. And in 1921 they ran a contest. This is how it all came about. They ran a contest.

And with the entries, I mean you could win some ridiculous thing, like a pincushion inside. It was ridiculous, but they were completely surprised. With all the entries came all these questions.

My pie crust is soggy. Why do my cakes keep falling? I don't know how to do this. They just were so excited to get an address to write a name.

I don't know. And so the man that was writing this contest began to answer things inside his name, and then there was a feeling, wait a minute, maybe a man is not the best idea.

This is a phenomenon. I can't believe this. And so everyone there began to sign Betty Crocker. So anyone who answered a customer was asked to sign the words Betty Crocker.

So they chose Betty out of a pool of names because it seemed kind of homey. And then Crocker was to honor a former employee. That's all.

And so gold metal flower also set up traveling cooking schools. One in particular in Oklahoma sold a heck of a lot of flour.

You know more flour that they're like the numbers looked strange. Right. What happened here? It caught the attention of corporate and the lady in charge of this particular school was Marjorie Child Houston. And she was brought to the home office in Minneapolis.

You obviously know what you're doing. She would do things like she would send. She'd land in a town and send high school girls out to like interview housewives about things and invite them to the thing.

And she just had all these interesting techniques and she had a way of relating to the housewife that they thought this is what we need.

So they brought her in. It's a woman they can relate to her. Oh yeah. She's a business woman. She's a home economist. She's a very skilled marketer.

She is. She turned Betty Crocker the name Betty Crocker into this empire that stretches to the modern day. Honestly. So in 1924 Betty Crocker acquired a voice in the radio show is the radio show debuted as a nation's first cooking show.

No they were voiced by different ladies because radio stations of the time didn't have a lot of range. Right. So until new technology caught up in the mid 30s when you know you could have one Betty Crocker. Right.

She had to have a whole bunch of local Betty Crocker all across the country. Right. So Betty Crocker and Cleveland sounded different than Betty Crocker in Kansas City.

But all over the nation ladies would get out their pencils and their pad of paper and sit eerily and listen for this show to come on and write the recipes down and the techniques and learn things.

Sure. It was because the only recipes they had were ones that were passed down. They wanted something new. Yeah. It was definitely destination radio.

...