TV Dinner creator dies

Inventor of TV Dinner dies at 83
First TV dinners drew hate mail from husbands
Wednesday, July 20, 2005; Posted: 7:27 p.m. EDT (23:27 GMT)

Gerry Thomas shows the present-day successor of his invention in this 1999 photo.

PHOENIX, Arizona (AP) -- Gerry Thomas, who changed the way Americans eat -- for better or worse -- with his invention of the TV Dinner during the baby boom years, has died at 83.

Thomas, who died in Paradise Valley on Monday after a bout with cancer, was a salesman for Omaha, Nebraska-based C.A. Swanson and Sons in 1954 when he got the idea of packaging frozen meals in a disposable aluminum-foil tray, divided into compartments to keep the foods from mixing. He also gave the product its singular name.

The first Swanson TV Dinner -- turkey with cornbread dressing and gravy, sweet potatoes and buttered peas -- sold for about $1 and could be cooked in 25 minutes at 425 degrees. Ten million sold in the first year of national distribution.

It was fast and convenient, and fit nicely on a TV tray in the living room, so that you didn't have to drag yourself away from your favorite television show.

'Modular' eating

Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, said the TV Dinner "started a change in American eating habits bigger than any change in culinary history since the discovery of fire and cooked foods."

The TV Dinner fit in with societal changes at the time, when more women were entering the work force and did not have the time to spend all day preparing dinner, Thompson said. It also helped introduce the notion of "modular" eating: If there were only two people at home, you put only two dinners in the oven.

"Some people claim that the TV Dinner was the first step toward breaking up the American family because it made it possible for everybody to eat in a modular way," Thompson said. "That was going to happen anyway. The redefinition of the American family was going on anyway."

In a 1999 Associated Press interview, Thomas recalled that the inspiration for the TV Dinner came when he was visiting a distributor, spotted a metal tray and was told it was developed for an experiment in the preparation of hot meals on airliners.

"It was just a single compartment tray with foil," he recalled. "I asked if I could borrow it and stuck it in the pocket of my overcoat."

Bonus pay for creation

He said he came up with a three-compartment tray because "I spent five years in the service so I knew what a mess kit was. You could never tell what you were eating because it was all mixed together."

Since interest in television was booming, he added: "I figured if you could borrow from that, maybe you could get some attention. I think the name made all the difference in the world."

"We had the TV screen and the knobs pictured on the package. That was the real start of marketing," Thomas said.

The TV Dinner drew "hate mail from men who wanted their wives to cook from scratch like their mothers did," Thomas said, but it got him a bump in pay to $300 a month and a $1,000 bonus.

"I didn't complain. A thousand dollars was a lot of money back then," he said.

After the Campbell Soup Co. acquired Swanson in 1955, Thomas became a sales manager, then marketing manager and director of marketing and sales. He left the company after a heart attack in 1970.

He later directed an art gallery and did consulting work.

"It's a pleasure being identified as the person who did this because it changed the way people live," Thomas said. "It's part of the fabric of our society."

Thompson said that until last year, Thomas had spent one day each summer talking to Thompson's history of television class for graduate students.

"This was really fun for them," Thompson said. "This was like meeting a great American industrial legend. So many things we take for granted remain anonymous. We know the architect that designed St. Peter's, but who knows the architect that designed that basic ranch-style house?"

The TV Dinner, Thompson said, is "one of the few things we've got that we actually have the human being who had his fingerprints all over it."

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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I hear when Gerry was cremated, they didn't cook him long enough. He was hot and burned on the outside, but still frozen in the middle.

What if wrestlers were... doctors?

I would trust my wife's cooch with Hawk and Animal, The Road Warrirors, because they always got the job done and were the only tag team to hold the tag team championship belts in every major promotion. And it's obvious by the serious looks on their faces, that they would kick any vaginal intruder into the next stratosphere.

"So, you think you're tough, huh, yeast infection?! Can you handle the Doomsday Device, our deadly finishing move, or this topical cream?! I didn't think so, punk!"

I do wonder, however, if it would be offsetting for any of the female patients if Hawk continued to use his catchphrase,"Uuuuuugh Whaaat Aaa Rush!"? Hmm, Who knows?

Template change

I recently needed to widen my content by a few pixels. If the blog is displaying strangley, please e-mail me. I've meade changes in the past and had problems not visible from my viewpoint. So, if that may be the case again, please let me know.

Thanks.

Inspirational School Posters: Discrimination

It's been awhile since we've seen an Inspirational School Poster on Bitch, Please. I apologize (I've been doing that a lot, latley).

Hurricane Dennis

Man, what a waste of a weekend Hurricane Dennis turned out to be!



I was so looking forward to having this past weekend off since it was a long week at work, and when it finally got here, Hurricane Dennis came along and f**ked everything up(I'm trying to stop swearing. eventually, I hope to be completely curse-free)!

Friday at work was a little weird. When I got there everyone was making plans to leave town and putting plastic over the computers. So, not being one to fight a chance to go home early on a Friday, I joined suit and left for the day. When I got home, however, my wife had been watching the news and the weather channel all day and was getting worried. They were saying Dennis was up to a Category 4, and the projected path was "somewhere between Mobile and Apalachicola", which wasn't very comforting since Mobile is 3 hours west of here, and Apalachicola is 2 hours east.


At this same time, my dad, step-mother, and brother and sister were on vacation in Puerto Rico, so no one was at the house which is on the beach and less than a mile from the shore. I tried reaching my dad on the phone in San Juan but couldn't get through. I decided I to put his hurricane shutters on since he was out-of-town and couldn't do it. Man, was that a pain in the ass. It took about three hours to do the entire thing.

So, after going home and watching the news, I said to my wife that if we're leaving we need to do it now, and not later. She decided she wanted to leave, so we packed our bags for about three days travel, and left for her aunt's house in Memphis, Tennessee with my wife's mother and niece also along for the ride.



So, after about ten hours of listening to my mother-in-law tell my wife to watch the speed limit, and seeing a billboard for an erotic bar called Wesley's Boobie Trap, we arrived.



I spent most of the next day swimming in her aunt and uncle's pool. The weather was pleasant, and her Memphis relatives were a lot cooler than the immediate family. They were much more mellow and knew how to control the volume and tone of their voices (mother-in-law, this means you!).

I really liked meeting my wife's cousin Adam. He's a musician in his 30s and he's currently working with a producer on his new album with his band. We weren't really in Memphis long enough to get to see the sites, but Adam told us that the next time we were there he could get us in clubs and bars all over town for free since his band plays all over Memphis. I heard one of his CDs before I got to meet him. My wife said it was from his last band that wasn't together anymore, and that it wasn't very new anymore, but it sounded pretty good. It had kind of a Three Doors Down quality to it, but not as melodramatic, I thought.

Well, after being there about two days, we had to drive all the way back to Panama City. I drove most of the way, going about ten miles over the speed limit the whole way, but strangely I never heard a sound out of my mother-in-law. I listened to Huey Lewis, Bare Naked Ladies, Eddie Money, R.E.M., and my Christian Rock CDs more than twice each. I was also treated to another interesting sign. This one was outside of a church and it stated "give Satan an inch, and he'll be a ruler". Hmm, how true.... how true, ha ha.



When we got back to our home, we found not a damned thing blown over or destroyed! No roof damage, no FEMA lines, no power outages, nothing! I didn't want MY place to get devoured but I thought I was gonna see some kind of storm impact. Hurricane Ivan took the same course through here and did some real damage around here. We had several tornadoes in the street (one actually hit the news channel as they were reporting), and several people died. But this time, not a thing.

It could be worse, I could be looking at the sun through a damp hole in the roof right now, but fortunately, I'm not.

The weekend wasn't a total loss, I suppose, since I finally forced myself to sit down and finish reading Dan Brown's Angels & Demons. I wish I could recommend it to people, but I can't really go out on that limb. I'm not exactly sure why I had such a hard time finishing the book since I flew right through Da Vinci Code, but I think it was because the books are so similar at the outset, and it seems like you're reading the same book at first. The last 100 pages were great, but it's hard to give a thumbs up on that criteria since it's a 569 page book (hardback).

I've decided to make F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby my next read. I'm not sure why I chose that one but I have and I've already read the first chapter. I've been reading more books of the Bible lately too, and going to church more frequently. It seems to balance me, and get me in a good place after a week of work and family crisis. In my last few scans, I've read Genesis, Exodus, Job, Mark, and I'm in Samuel 1 at the moment. So far, Mark has been the most entertaining, as it reads like Jesus' Greatest Hits, while Job was probably more thought-provoking.

I also bought and watched Greatest Wrestling Superstars of the '80s, which was cool.

I still haven't been able to find the balance between being on the PC at work ,and being on the PC at home. It's tough for me to get online after staring at the damned monitor at the office all day. Am I the only one with that problem? Although, I think I'm slowly starting to get there.