THE HOLE TRUTH
In "The Object at Hand," Smithsonian, March 1998, David A. Taylor traces the origin of the doughnut back to ancient times and presents some stories (not documented or referenced in scholarly fashion) about the hole originating from such sources as a hungry sea captain who speared fried bread on one of the spokes of his wheel while keeping both hands on those spokes during a heavy storm. The doughnut was popularized among troops during World War I, although Taylor says the term "doughboy" originated earlier from other sources. A New York baker opened a Broadway doughnut shop in 1920 that presented an eye-catching public display of doughnut cooking. It attracted many spectators and grew into a large-scale business. The Krispy Krème doughnut company began in the southeast in 1937 and spread regionally. Dunkin' Donuts, a 1950 entrant obtained far greater distribution. Taylor does not discuss franchising in the otherwise informative company sketches.
EDITORIAL – World War I is generally credited with popularizing not only doughnuts, but also soft collar-attached shirts for men (in place of the starched, separate collar) and male wristwatches (previously considered to be effeminate), and cigarette smoking (instead of the more masculine cigar or pipe). World War II, of course, had profound effects upon technology, particularly in many forms of electronics, and the post-war GI Bill is credited with stimulating suburban decentralization and increased higher education. But do RIM readers know of any particular consumer taste changes (besides SPAM) attributable to WWII similar to those mentioned for WWI?
KEEP THOSE WOMEN DRIVERS ON THE ROAD
Midwest Correspondent: Kathy Rassuli
An article appearing in the Fall 1997 issue of the Journal of American Culture, [Vol. 20, No. 3, 18 p], by Laura L. Behling, entitled "The Woman at the Wheel: Marketing Ideal Womanhood: 1915-1934" chronicles the auto industry's attempts to reach out to a new segment of drivers. The article notes that Robert and Helen Lynd's Middletown series credited the car with "greatly expanding the roles of women and freeing them from the home." It is full of interesting anecdotes from the annals of advertising history. Moreover, the article provided RIM's Midwest correspondent with an eye-opening look at past perceptions of her gender. For example, Behling notes "By the mid-1870s….the idea that a woman was inherently an imitator, not an originator, had become one of the most pervasive clichés of Western culture." The author goes on to describe how this cliché of woman's inability to create or originate, or even be visible without the help of man…" found its way into the advertising of the day. Thank goodness those days are behind us now!
LOST & FOUND:
BUSINESS HISTORY REVIEW WEBSITE
One of RIM's crack correspondents, Kathy Rassuli, has alerted us of a website for the Business History Review— http://info.bris.ac.uk/~hirm/bhr.html
—located at the University of Bristol. Although BHR is an American journal published at Harvard, this website is maintained in the U.K. The site contains a list of all articles published beginning with Vol. 1, 1926, G.A. Rich's article "Our Primary Purpose," all the way through Stan Hollander's (1964) "Nineteenth Century Anti-Drummer Legislation in the United States (Vol. 38, No. 4, pps. 479-500), and ending with Vol. 67, No. 4, W.N. Parker's "A 'New' Business History? A Commentary on the 1993 Nobel Prize in Economics."
Folkways Records, which is famous for recording such singers as Pete Seegar and Leadbelly, celebrates its 50th anniversary in 1998 according to Peter Goldsmith, author of the company history Making Peoples' Music, interviewed on Terry Gross' NPR radio show "Fresh Air." Moe Asch, son of the celebrated Yiddish-American author, Sholem Asch, was a writer for the Jewish Daily Forward, a popular newspaper among the New York immigrant community in the early 20th century. Signed to develop the paper's radio station, WEVD, he used his father's connections to recruit Yiddish singers and then gradually expanded to other genres such as blues, folk, and labor music. The record label, in turn, followed as a direct growth of his radio station recruitment. It is a classic example of product line extension even though some music lovers might want to reserve the term classics for Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach.
KEEP IT UNDER WRAPS
The History of Advertising Trust newsletter suggests wrapping archival material in recycled bedsheets and other household linens. Apparently cotton wrapping is very helpful in controlling moisture content and thus resisting deterioration of paper material.
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