The Soul of Sliced Bread and Breakfast Cereal

An area where psychoanalysis still holds sway is eating disorder therapy. Moms can transfer neurosis to children through the way they manage the child’s diet. I have no particular knowledge of the intricacies of this problem--I’m fortunate to have not been touched myself or within my close family by this disease--but in reading Ernest Dichter’s marketing research, I have a new interest in how my mother managed her kitchen.

I think my mom was fairly tidy in her packaging of my school lunchbox, but there were times I could tell she was falling in a rut. After three straight months of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and potato chips, I was bored to death with lunch. I think we came to a mutual agreement that it would be better for us both if she just gave me a lunch allowance to eat from the school cafeteria.

According to Dichter in Handbook of Consumer Motivations (he’s writing about 1950s homemakers) moms take special care in packing their children’s school lunches. “Food wrappings are a demonstration of the concern and affection in which the members of the family are held. . . .Women respondents wrapped the package in a certain way to make sure that it was secure. Many women would run their hand over it. They would do it several times. It was as if they could seal the wrap by the magic of touch. Among other respondents it was noted that when they had finished wrapping an item, they tended to square the package. These homemakers felt that the better the shape of the package was, the more securely it was wrapped.”

Through my mother’s example, I have always had brand loyalty to Mrs. Baird’s white bread. It’s been banned from my home for twenty years or so as an empty carb food, but if I were to buy a loaf of white bread, I would buy Mrs. Baird’s.

Anyone who grew up in the Dallas area knows that Mrs. Baird was a grandmother who baked bread and delivered it in a buggy. Many of us children toured a Mrs. Baird’s baking plant as a field trip within scouts or some similar children’s activity. We remember the wonderful aroma of the plant and getting to eat a slice from a fresh baked loaf covered in melted butter.

The Baird boys, I’m sure, had a marketing department that helped establish the “image” (Dichter’s term) of the product. They were pleased with the nostalgic grandma image and also approved and maintain today the advertising line that Mrs. Baird’s “continues the tradition of hand twisting each loaf of bread, a special commitment to quality.” According to one Dichter study, consumers “preferred bakeries where workers did touch the dough and where the bakers acted as if they were baking bread for themselves at home.” Robotic man hygienically covered to prevent his germs from contaminating food product at Lubbock Mrs. Baird's plant

Mrs. Baird’s is now owned by Bimbo Bakeries. I can imagine the owners eating lunch at their country club and fretting over the regional baking business. My recommendation to them is that they buy machines to twist the bread, give the poor man above a decent job, and lay off several of their marketing dick executives to pay for it.

The sale to Bimbo was tied to misbehavior of Vernon and Carroll--Ninnie would have been ashamed of them. http://www.answers.com/topic/mrs-baird-s-bakeries?cat=biz-fin

Other fifties moms preferred breads like Wonder Bread and Sunbeam that promised energy from space-age nutrients. Breakfast foods, too, promised powerful ingredients to provide strength. Regarding breakfast, my mom fit Dichters’s observation that at breakfast not only do we need to “replenish the sources of our bodily energy physically,” but psychologically, breakfast is “ a rehearsal for coming battles, a stocktaking of our resources and a tuning of our senses to the world at large.” We want crunchy cereals because we “look upon breakfast as a sort of adversary that has to be conquered.” For those of a less pugilistic spirit (I’m one of these), we prefer crunchy cereals rather than mushy soft cereals because crunchy cereals “fulfill our tactile curiosity. You can play with cereals in an oral fashion. They have interesting shapes that can be cracked with a snap, crackle and pop.”

Kellogg's Frosted Flakes' endorsement by Superman matches Nike's use of Michael Jordan, but probably at a much smaller cost.

For more about the gender of cereals and sandwiches, including Rice Krispies, see this article.

According to Dichter, "the future trend will not be a supermodern pattern of “atom-powered” cereals. The truly modern cereal will combine all the warmth and affection of the substantial old-fashioned cereal with the fun, lightness, and convenience of modern dry cereal.” (He was right on target here.)

Many of the fifties families in my neighborhood could be classified as lower middle class restrictive or lower middle class expansive. (Click here to see previous blog on fifties suburban social classes.) Use of sugar at breakfast may be a litmus test of our families’ social class. According to Dichter, “sugar is a conflict product. We need it and want it and at the same time we are often afraid of it. . . . Every time the housewife reaches for a package of sugar, . . . she is subject to conflicting feelings of varying intensity.” Moms can basically be classified as sugar hedonists, sugar moderates, or sugar puritans.

I commend my mother (who has never had a weight problem) for being a sugar hedonist, but doing it in such a way that it was no big psychological deal. Despite her Twinkie- and cookie- and Coke-filled cupboards, I’ve always been able to stay away with no effort from all sugar-based, refined products.

We Thought We Were Providing Our Children With Paradise, and They Found It To Be Hell

Mine was not always a happy childhood, and I sometimes blamed my parents for selecting our family home in the bland, sterile neighborhoods of Casa View. If I were asked, “What would have been the right and best place to grow up?,” I would have stumbled in confusion. Perhaps an extended rather than a nuclear family, in neighborhoods reflecting the range of diversity in races, ethnicity, and income levels. Where everything was not new—such as in a dense city with a history of place and with a long development of commercial and social systems. Or perhaps on a farm, close to nature and exempt from consumer shopping and materialist concerns. Or in a place where there were not so many kids banging up against one another in overcrowded schools.

Herbert Gans, in The Levittowners,(1967) points out that nonsuburban types of homeplaces had their owns sorts of unpleasantness.

Yet even though Levittowners and other lower middle class Americans continue to be home-centered, they are much more “in the world” than their parents and grandparents were. Those coming out of ethnic working class backgrounds have rejected the “amoral familism” which pits every family against every other in the struggle to survive and the ethnocentrism which made other cultures and even neighborhoods bitter enemies. This generation trusts its neighbors, participates with them in social and civic activities, and no longer sees government as inevitably corrupt. Even working class Levittowners have begun to give up the suspicion that isolated their ancestors from all but family and childhood friends. Similarly, the descendants of rural Protestant America have given up the xenophobia that turned previous generations against the Catholic and Jewish immigrants, they have almost forgotten the intolerant Puritanism which triggered attacks against pleasure and enjoyment, and they no longer fully accept the doctrine of laissez faire that justifies the defense of individual rights and privileges against others’ needs. . . . These and other changes have come about not because people are not better or more tolerant human beings, but because they are affluent. For the Levittowners, life is not a fight for survival anymore.

When it came time to find a homeplace for my own brood of four children, my wife and I picked a small, college town. For many years, we lived within a block of the downtown courthouse square. Residents in our neighborhoods were of diverse backgrounds. The smalltown community, and the nearby large cities, provided abundant social and cultural capital. We later moved a bit out of town to a 1912 farmhouse, with farm animals, and thousands of acres of parkland. All proved boring to my brood.

So it goes that, according to my kids, I failed them just as my parents failed me. By the age of 18, my daughter was dead set that she was going to get out of her boring hometown and never come back. My son, attending his tenth year high school reunion recently, remarked on the general contempt many of the graduates (those who had moved to other parts of the country) felt toward their hometown.

Jesus, If Market Researchers Can Figure Out Motivation, Why Don’t Just Rule The World?

The infamous Virgina Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho was analyzed by the media and its experts from many points of view, including psychoanalysis. Psychologists and psychiatrists disagreed concerning whether the best diagnosis for Cho was autism, Aspergers, or paranoid schizophrenia. Some of a psychoanalytic bent explored Cho from the viewpoint that he might have been a repressed homosexual. In response to various speculations about Cho’s psychosexual problems, one writer commented that (in 2007) psychoanalysis is an unproven and discarded theory.

If I were forced to read today book after book of psychoanalytic theory, I would be bored to tears, in part because I would find speculation after speculation to be lacking in scientific proof but also unable to subjectively ring true to my understanding of myself and the people around me.

I do find today some benefit from reading books that contain psychoanalytic speculations on my motivations toward consumer products. Whatever their orientation, most psychoanalysts writing during the first half of the twentieth century were shooting from the hip with little accuracy, missing their mark as often as hitting it. The researchers on the individual’s relationship with inanimate objects, that is consumer goods such as autos, soaps, toothpaste, and cake mixes, used methodologies that would hardly pass muster in any graduate level university research program today.

The leading depth boy or the 1940s-1960s, Ernest Dichter, was trained under some of the best scholars of pre-war Vienna. Psychoanalysis was not taught and even banned as a subject of discussion in the university program he attended. But as a sort of sideline, he did go through analysis and practice for a short time as a therapist.

In the U.S. for his corporate clients, Dichter approached each project with a variety of study approaches, usually a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods. He basically invented the use of focus groups as a technique of marketing research. He is credited with making first use of the term “image” to describe the important brand qualities that must be developed to distinguish commodities.

In earlier blogs, I’m mentioned many of his insights. Here’s a few more worthy of consideration.

--Why do cake mixes usually require that an egg be added?
The manufacturers could easily include the egg or a substitute as part of the dry mixture.
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.cooking-chat/msg/e4ae9f3134d5b3c4
http://books.google.com/books?id=yzIm-oJyXNkC&pg=PA168&lpg=PA168&dq=dichter+%22cake+mix%22+egg&source=web&ots=aJyER84A-O&sig=KSSzDEX71YDe7P0DZM5ujqPJlQo
Dichter found housewives have a need to put a cook’s touch to the cake. An egg is a symbol of fertility.

from Dichter's Handbook, 1964

Baking provides a feeling of love and security. Aroma and odors pervading the house when mother was baking are fondly remembered. The most fertile moment occurs when the woman pulls the finished cake, bread loaf, or other baked product out of the oven. In a sense it is like giving birth. How did it turn out? Did it fulfill expectations? Once the baked product is placed before the family a good part of the interest of the housewife has been lost.

--Who buys new automobiles and why?
Ernest Dichter’s research for the auto industry set the tone for much fifties and sixties advertising. In a previous blog, I have mentioned several of his findings—that people have fond memories of their first cars, that cars are an expression of freedom and independence for housewives. The commercial from the previous blog is scripted from Dichter’s playbook—that wives usually make the final purchase decision. Dichter also found that car owners associate a car whose doors close firmly and securely with a well made vehicle. Americans also have a mystical attachment to family road trips.

--Who drank my dad’s Chivas Regal?

According to Wilson Bryan Key, Subliminal Seduction, 1973

Market research on Scotch drinkers revealed that individuals who drink Chivas Regal rarely serve it to friends. At best, these scotch drinkers, even those at the very high income level of over $25,000 per year, will keep Chivas Regal for only their bery best friends, clients, or special guests whom they are trying to impress. Chivas drinkers usually keep less expensive brands of Scotch around the house for general guests or casual or lower station visitors.

Key, a notorious quack, paranoid, and pervert [who sees vaginas, penises and the word “Sex” in anything, but especially advertising], goes on to analyze that the ad above actually contains the subliminal picture of a dog (man’s best friend) which is intended to provide an unconscious stimulation to the purchase of alcohol.

--Jesus, If Focus Groups and Opinion Polls Can Figure Out Motives, Why Don’t Just Rule The World?

From The Assault on Reason, Al Gore, 2007

After a long and detailed review of all the polling information and careful testing of potential TV commercials, the anticipated response from my opponent’s campaign and the planned response to the response, my campaign made a recommendation and predication that surprises me with its specificity: “If you run this ad at this many “points” [a measure of the size of the advertising buy], and if Ashe responds as we anticipate, and then we purchase this many points to air our response to this response, the net result after three weeks will be an increase of 8.5 percent in your lead in the polls.”

I authorized the plan and was astonished when three weeks later my lead had increased by exactly 8.5 percent. Though pleased, or course, I had a sense of foreboding for what this revealed about our democracy. Clearly, at least to some degree, the “consent of the governed” was becoming a commodity to be purchased by the highest bidder.

When Baby Boomers Meet their Maker

I hope that entire industries must review their work products at the pearly gates.

I think the logistics boys—those whose careers have consisted of engineering smart distribution of products—will make it to heaven. They’ve done much to keep prices low during the last several decades.

And I think the bomb engineers may have a chance. When Ike or MacArthur pushed the button, they would indiscriminately kill tens of thousands. With smart bombs, Bill Clinton and George Bush can at least keep the target relatively small.

Everyone who has had anything to do with the U.S. chemical industry likely will go to hell, especially those chemists in white lab jackets who create the ingredients to packaged household goods such as insecticides, herbicides, detergents, beauty products, over-the-counter drugs, and packaged foodstuffs. I’m sure there are worse villains among the ranks of the Dow Chemicals and Procter and Gambles of the world, but the group in charge of consumer products have left whole continents of toxic waste behind them.

The hardware and software engineers likely will make it in. With Hollywood, the U.S. computer industry has been a key to the country’s maintenance of trade balances and prosperity.

Each Hollywood producer, director, and actor will have to state his case individually to St. Peter. The group working in this scene from Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing Charm School likely will make it in.

And also all dance instructors, including Mrs. Keeling, will find their places in heaven.

Hoover, FDR, Reagan, Bush and Reinhardt

The explosive growth of Dallas suburbs in the fifties has explanations in some larger currents of U.S. history.

When my parents were young adolescents growing up in Tulsa, OK, they likely read in newspapers about the 1932 Bonus Expeditionary Force, a force of 15,000 veterans who marched across the U.S. and encamped in Washington DC to cash in veterans’ bonuses approved by Congress in 1924. General Douglas MacArthur, then Army chief of staff, brought in troops, some led by lower level officers Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton, to rout the Hooverville squatters.

Hoover’s hard line toward vets helped bring a new president into office, who took up the need for national support of veterans. In a 1943 fireside chat, FDR pledged that U.S. troops returning from WWII must never come home “into an environment of inflation and unemployment, to a place on a bread line or a corner selling apples. . . We must this time, have plans ready.”

Roosevelt signed the GI Bill of Rights in June 1944, providing returning vets with a goldmine of benefits, including tuition and living expenses for post-secondary education as well as government guarantee of mortgages for homes. In 1945, less than 5 percent of Americans held college degrees and less that two out of five had completed high school. It is estimated that U.S. education support for veterans provided nearly three years to the average vet’s education. Government support also helped finance nearly 90 percent of private homes constructed in the 1950s. The educated workforce was so widely productive that during the fifties the wage gap between social classes reached an all time low.

So my dad, coming out of an impoverished childhood during the depression and wartime military service, was fortunate to have a government which more or less slingshot him into middle class respectability, with a business school education and a new home and car. My family’s trajectory toward affluence was helped again by their use of expanding credit sources in the late fifties and sixties.

The GI bill was offered to all vets, regardless of station or race or creed [Rosie the Riveter got no such benefits], but the absence of government laws against discrimination led to patterns of suburban segregation difficult to overcome. By 1960, not a single black had been able to buy among the 82,000 new homes built in Levittown, New York (or Casa Linda/Casa View).

In 1967, Martin Luther King spoke of the 1932 Bonus Marchers when he called for hundreds of thousands of marchers to again make camp in Washington DC. He reminded Americans that, in emulating the Bonus Marchers, “The stirring lesson of this age is that nonviolent direct action is not a peculiar device for Negro agitation, Rather it is an historically validated method for defending freedom and democracy, and for enlarging these values for the benefit of the whole society.”

Since WWII, each succeeding decade has brought U.S. vets declining benefits. Bush’s National Guard forces in Iraq, as second class military, have taken over half the casualties in the war but are eligible to received only a third of the GI Bill benefits available to regular troops.

It is an irony that “The Greatest Generation” benefited so greatly from a political system that supported their economic growth, but under leadership of men like Reagan and the Bushes has undercut similar levels of support to their new generation of young warriors.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=20058

A Reinhardt Mystery

According to Ernest Dichter, in The Handbook of Consumer Motivation, all boys and girls love their bicycles. “Together with the first dog owned, the bicycle represents one of the first symbols of independence and pride of possession. The bicycle is oiled and shined. The first trips taken with a bike are often symbolic demonstrations of growing maturity, or getting away from family.”

It was my love of bicycles—of taking them apart and rebuilding them with parts from other bicycles—that caused me to strike up a friendship with Burley Gilliam. Burley lived in a small frame house on a deadend street—Stevens Street, which I walked down most days on my way to and from school. The builders of Eastwood Park had created a small easement and sidewalk so that people could walk from Sylvia Dr. in Eastwood Park to the industrial area around Cayuga. Many early residents likely used the sidewalk to walk over to the old country store, Sullivan’s.

My memories of Burley are extremely vague. My main interest was the metal shed behind his house, where he had many junk bikes. I think I bought off of him a 26” two-speed bendix back wheel and hub, which I spoked into my 20” DIY prototype sting ray bike.

My general memory was that he came from a very poor family and lived in a very wild and crazy home at the end of Stevens.

As I often do when I research my blogs, I googled Burley Gilliam and have found an extremely notorious man within the U.S. criminal justice system. Various clues indicate this is the same Burley Gilliam who lived at the end of Stevens—and who seemed to mysteriously disappear as one of our schoolmates by the fifth grade or so. One clue is that Burley Gilliam is an extremely unusual name.

Here’s the Florida prison systems info on Burley:

DC Number: 097234
Name: GILLIAM, BURLEY
Race: WHITE
Sex: MALE
Hair Color: BLONDE OR STRAWBERRY
Eye Color: HAZEL
Height: 5'08''
Weight: 211 lbs.
Birth Date: 08/13/1948
Initial Receipt Date:
04/02/1985
Current Facility: UNION C.I.
Current Custody: MAXIMUM
Current Release Date: DEATH SENTENCE

Aliases: BURLEY GILLIAM

Scars, Marks, and Tattoos:
Type Location Description
TATTOO OTHER FLY ON PENIS
TATTOO RIGHT LEG COBRA LOWER LEG

Current Prison Sentence History:
Offense Date Offense Sentence Date County Case No. Prison Sentence Length
06/08/1982 1ST DG MUR/PREMED. OR ATT. 02/01/1985 MIAMI-DADE 8214766 DEATH SENTENCE
06/08/1982 SEX BAT/ WPN. OR FORCE 02/01/1985 MIAMI-DADE 8214766 SENTENCED TO LIFE

Note that he was born in 1948, just the right age to have been a schoolmate in the fifties.

Also, more google work and review of various legal transcripts indicates Burley had strong ties to Dallas, His first conviction for rape occurred in Dallas in 1969; in a transcript, he says his mother-in-law lived in Dallas.

Here’s a short summary of some of his early home life—all of which is in keeping with my minimal memories of his household on Stevens St.

Dr. Marquit testified to the following significant facts concerning Burley Gilliam's life: Burley was abused by his father who was an alcoholic (R. 2846); his mother was a "nervous-type" of person who could not control her children and was out of the house for long periods of time (R. 2846); as a result of his mother's inability to act as a parent, Burley, the oldest child, was forced to take care of the rest of the children, a responsibility for which he was not prepared to handle (R. 2847, 2855); when something went wrong involving the other children, Burley was punished (R. 2847, 2855); he had very little parental nurturing (R. 2847); he was a "very sickly child" who suffered a myriad of health problems (R. 2848); he had a learning disability (2848-9); his learning disability was neglected by his mother because she provided nothing in terms of parenting other than physical necessities (R. 2849); in addition to his father, his mother also was an alcoholic (R. 2849); he was beaten "considerably" by his step-father (R. 2850); he is not sadistic (R. 2860-1); and he does not hold a grudge against his mother or father for the fact that they were not good parents (R. 2860).

At the penalty phase, before the jury, Koch relied on guilt phase testimony from several of Gilliam’s family members: Koch: Your Honor, we have no additional testimony to present. We likewise would be relying on the testimony of Kay Salem, John Beagle, Fay Beagle, and Dean Wilkins [sic].[13] The only evidence the State presented was a certified copy of Gilliam’s 1969 rape conviction in support of the prior violent felony aggravator. As did the defense, the State relied on the testimony adduced during the guilt phase: [State]: At this stage of the proceedings, the State would be relying on the testimony of Dr. Rao, Souviron, Wilder, and the testimony of Mr. Walter Burt, with particularity to the issue raised in this trial.

Gilliam’s mother, Ludine Wilkins, and sisters, Cecil Faye Beagle and Kay Salem, testified during the guilt phase that Gilliam’s stepfather brutally beat him as a child.

Appellant's sister, Erleni Salem, testified that their mother was not home "much of the time" to supervise her brother Burley Gilliam and the other children. She testified that their mother worked during the day and evenings and "partied the times she wasn't home" (R. 2886). Ms. Salem described how Appellant was the saving grace for her son Lloyd after her husband's death (R. 2888-89).

For the gruesome details of Gilliam's 1982 crime, click here.

Is this Burley Gilliam the boy at Reinhardt whom I bought my bike parts from?

Creeps in the Suburbs

William H. Whyte, in the 1956 book The Organization Man, devotes more than 100 pages to examining the influence of corporate men in fifties suburban neighborhoods. According to him, those mid-level managers, technicians and salesmen set the tone in the neighborhoods and were looked up to as opinion leaders.

I'm not sure they all were so special in the opinion of my mother. As she looked across the neighborhoods and rated the male breadwinners, she used a more complex set of criteria. Mr. X. was a creep, even though a high earner, because he was a dictatorial overcompensator with his wife and children. He even insulted the other bridge ladies when he found them at his home, making everyone feel that they were below him and his doormat wife in social class. Mr. Y was an atheist, and did not even go to church each Sunday with his devout Baptist wife. Mr. Z. was a drunkard, yelled at his wife, and poisoned his next door neighbor's dog to shut up its barking.

For my mother, the dads that had status were good earners, but also caring husbands and fathers. They were hard workers, but also fun. I don't know if any of the men in our neighborhood passed her muster, including my dad. She let us know that the real love of her life was Dean Martin.

Even the organization men didn't necessarily have it easy in our neighborhoods. My dad was struck with a bleeding ulcer in the early 60s from all the stress his job and family gave him; the hospital had to give him 39 pints of blood to keep him alive. I wish he had watched this educational film:



If the player does not work, click here to go to the video.