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Obit Sparks Debate Over TV Dinner Creator
from yahoo
By MICHELLE ROBERTS
Thu Aug 4, 3:07 PM ET
PHOENIX - This much is certain: When C.A. Swanson & Sons began selling a frozen turkey dinner with peas and sweet potatoes, the housewives of baby boom America snapped them up, and the TV Dinner, with its three-compartment aluminum tray, soon became a symbol of postwar consumer society.
So when Gerry Thomas, the Paradise Valley retiree often credited with inventing the TV Dinner, died last month, it was widely reported as the passing of the man behind a piece of 20th century Americana.
Since then, though, questions have been raised about whether the 83-year-old former Swanson salesman and marketing executive — and member of the Frozen Food Industry Hall of Fame — got too much credit.
Pinnacle Foods Corp., the company that now sells Swanson-brand frozen foods, considers Thomas the man who developed the concept of the TV Dinner, a frozen meal marketed in a box made to look like the front of a television set at a time when TVs were going from novelty to household appliance.
The Swanson frozen foods business has gone through several owners since the creation of the TV Dinner — Pinnacle Foods acquired the brand in 2001 — but the story of Thomas' involvement is the one that has been passed down from one corporate generation to another.
"We don't have any reason to disbelieve that history," said Kelley Maggs, a spokesman for the New Jersey-based company.
On Sunday, the Los Angeles Times published an editorial calling Thomas "a charlatan." The editorial was based on a 2003 article in which Swanson heirs and a Swanson employee of the era denied Thomas was the inventor of the TV Dinner.
Betty Cronin, a 76-year-old former bacteriologist and product developer for Swanson, said she does not believe Thomas deserves credit for inventing the TV Dinner.
She helped developed the company's fried chicken dinner and knew Thomas, then a salesman for Swanson. She said from her New Jersey home Wednesday that she does not understand how he came to be touted as the creator of the TV Dinner.
Cronin said that Clarke Swanson, one of the brothers who ran company, worked on the tray design, and that many people in sales and marketing were called together to figure out how the oven-ready meals would be sold.
Thomas himself claimed he came up with the idea for the three-compartment tray, coined the "TV Dinner" name and developed the packaging that helped sell the dinners to a country fascinated by the new medium of television.
Thomas' wife, Susan, said in an interview shortly after Thomas' death July 18 that his contribution to the TV Dinner was the marketing. "If he was an inventor of anything, it was an inventor of slogans or names," she said.
Frozen dinners existed before Swanson began selling them in 1954.
Maxson Food Systems Inc. was selling frozen three-part meals for airplane passengers in 1945, according to Library of Congress researchers. Some smaller companies were selling frozen dinners on aluminum trays in the early 1950s, but it was not until Swanson's TV Dinner hit supermarket shelves that tens of millions of the tray dinners were served up in American living rooms.
Robert Thompson, a Syracuse University professor and authority on television and American pop culture, said that until last year, Thomas had spent one day each summer talking to graduate students in Thompson's history-of-television class.
Thompson said that corporate histories can be difficult to verify, and sometimes, particular individuals are selected as frontmen for innovations.
"When you're talking about a corporate invention, the question of authorship is so much more complex," he said.
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On the Net:
Library of Congress page on TV Dinners: http://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/mysteries/tvdinner.html
Swanson Foods: http://www.swansonmeals.com/webportals/
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