In which I realize that Oscar Mayer was a real person
I am embarrassed to admit that until recently it never occurred to me that Oscar Mayer was a real person. After all, Betty Crocker, who played a much larger role in the kitchen of my childhood, was a fictional character. In fact, I didn’t even think about him as a fictional person. Oscar Mayer was just a pair of words in a jingle. [WARNING: Clicking the video below may produce an ear worm.]
Imagine my surprise when he started popping up in Sigrid Schultz’s papers as a successful Chicago businessman who had been a friend of her father’s and who she viewed as a uncle of sorts.
Mayer emigrated from Bavaria to the United States in 1873, at the age of fourteen. He started working in Detroit as a butcher’s boy, then moved to Chicago.* With the dream of opening his own business, he asked his brother Gottfried, who was still in Germany, to study sausage-making. In 1883, he opened his first store, Oscar F Mayer and Bros. From that small beginning he went whole hog into the meat business. (Sorry. Sometimes I can’t help myself.)
There was a thriving market for high-quality sausages in Chicago. Soon the brothers became more than a neighborhood butcher. They used a horse-drawn wagon to deliver sausages throughout the city, taking what was then the unusual step of creating brand names for their products so that customers could ask for them by name. By 1904, Mayer employed eight salesmen who covered a territory with more than 280 grocery stores. Fifteen years later, the company purchased a farmer’s cooperative meat-packing plant in Wisconsin that allowed them to triple their sales.
All this makes me wonder whether there was a Sara Lee? A Chef Boyardee? A Mrs. Butterworth? (For the record, Colonel Sanders was for real.)
*Which was, after all, hog butcher to the world.
And Now We Are 10!
It’s hard to believe we’ve been hanging out here on the Margins for ten years now. This blog started out as an experiment. It quickly turned into a conversation. (As far as I know, that first post had only three readers: my dad, My Own True Love, and my BFF from graduate school. Now there are some 3000 of you.)
Back in March, I blithely promised you a History in the Margins Top 10, without any sense of what that would mean. Luckily, quite a few of you took me up on my invitation to make suggestions about what should be on the list. Because how on earth could I chose ten out of a thousand?
The posts I’ve linked to below may not be the ten best posts I’ve written in the last ten years. But they are ten posts that you have enjoyed. Which makes me very happy.
In no particular order:
1. The Christmas Truce of 1914
2. The Thrill of the Vote (Some of you sharp-eyed folks may notice that this first appeared in 2008. That’s true. It originally ran as a guest post on someone else’s blog.)
3.Cornelia Fort: Eyewitness to Pearl Harbor
5. Florence Nightingale Does the Math
7. Napoleon on the Art of War:
8. Word with a Past: Silhouette
9. Prince Henry, the So-Called Navigator
10. Road Trip Through History: Lake Itasca State Park and the Headwater of the Mississippi
And speaking of Road Trips Through History, I’m going to cheat and give you a link to an entire category instead of a single post as a lagniappe. As I read through posts from the last ten years, I realized that an extraordinary number of my personal favorites are about places we’ve visited on our travels. (This may be because I’m eager to hit the road again after a year of no travel, no museums, and not historical markers.) Road Trip Through History posts have been part of History in the Margins from the beginning. In my third post, I described what I like in a road trip: Road Trip Through History: The Utopian Communities of New Harmony. I clearly had no idea that it would be the first of many posts about our history-nerd adventures. If this is the kind of thing you like, you can find all of the Road Trip Through History posts here. With any luck we’ll be hitting the road again in a few weeks, and I’ll have more history-nerd adventures to share.
Thanks to you all for reading along over the last ten years. I’m looking forward to many more.
In Praise of Nurses, Again. (And Always)
A post in praise of nurses during National Nurses Week, which runs from May 6 through May 12 * here in the United States, has become a tradition here on the Margins.
Like many of the best traditions, it happened almost without my noticing it. In the months after Heroines of Mercy Street was published, in 2016, I found myself talking to nurses–and their friends, mothers, daughters, granddaughters and nieces. (And occasionally their fathers, sons, grandsons and nephews.) The experience confirmed my long-held opinion that nurses rock. When National Nurse Week appeared on my radar, I knew I needed to celebrate.
After the year we’ve been through, I think it’s even more important to recognize nurses for the important, sometimes dangerous work they do. In honor of the nurses I know, and the nurses I don’t, here are links to a series of posts from 2016 about Clara Barton, the first nurse to catch my imagination:
Clara Barton: Nursing Outside the Box
Clara Barton, Act II: Finding the Missing
Clara Barton, Act III: The American Red Cross
If you run into a nurse this week, say thank you for a hard job done well.
*Florence Nightingale’s birthday.
* * *
And speaking of birthdays: History in the Margins turns ten next week. I’m putting together a list of ten of the posts that people have enjoyed the most. Back in March, I asked you to share any posts that you particularly remember for inclusion on this list. I still have a couple of spots left. If there is a post you’d like to nominate, let me know by Sunday, May 9, at 5:00 pm, Central time.