Behind the Scenes Minis: Chocolate Chips and Public Relations

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday, everybody. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. Tracy, I have to ask you, and you kind of hinted at it, when did your family get a microwave? So I'm not sure exactly what year it was, but I was born in n and I'm old enough to remember it entering our household, and it was in a manner radar range. And I actually wonder now that I think about it, the house that I grew up in was built in the nineteen fifties and we had a dishwasher, and I don't really know. I don't remember if the dishwasher was there from the time I was tiny, or if they had to do work to make room for the dishwasher. But if the dishwasher was already there, the space on top of it was like the correct space to put a microwave. So I kind of wonder if the house was built with the intent that a microwave would go there, or if that was just coincidental. But um, the thing I specifically remember was my mother's insistence that we needed to stay at least an arms length away from it while it was cooking. Uh. And I also found a picture of a model of the radar range from that era, and I like, I have a sense memory of you you pulled down a handle to open it. It was like you pulled the handle down and it kind of unlocked the door and it pulled the rest of the way down. Yeah. I have such a strangely strong memory of shopping with my parents for our first microwave. And that would have been it was after we moved to Florida, That's how I can say it. Um. And that would have been nine, at the end of nine, so sometime after that. And I remember the salesman being like your mom was where you'd stay away a little missy, like this is dangerous stuff, and that just I will never forget, like him kind of scare tacticking me about the whole thing. But we ended up taking that microwave home and that was that. Um. I have a very ridiculous story about microwaves and experiments, which is that, Um, when my beloved and I first got married, I had a microwave already and he had too. One was like his actual functioning microwave and one was one that he bought to try to fix up. And so at that point we had three microwaves, so we picked one that we were going to keep. We gave one of them away to the housekeeper at my work at the time, um, because she was moving and she was like, I actually do need a microwave. I was like, great, here you go. Um. And then the one that was kind of jankie and didn't work great. We as the children that we were, we didn't want to give it away to anybody because if something went wrong, we would feel terrible. So we were like blow things up. And so one afternoon on a weekend, we went out on the patio because they're portable, you can cook at the patio, and we put things in the microwave you're not supposed to put things you're not supposed to put in there, like we did the egg and watched it explode. We put a CD in there and watched it spin and spark. That was fun. Um. Yeah, we just did silly thing, nothing like cruel or dangerous. Truly, we were, you know, very ready. Brian Is I call him safety Pup because he's very into like always being safe. So he had the the fire extinguisher at the ready, and we just played and it was very silly and a great start to our marriage. But um, there are some interesting video explainers online if you've ever wondered about that whole You shouldn't put metal in the microware, Yeah, because you can, but it's not real smart. It will basically cause it to spark, and if it's something like a four that has sharp edges, sometimes those sparks get a little more intense and they can cause a fire, and that's why you shouldn't do it. Also, the metal will actually block your microwaves, so you're not going to cook your food if you put it in a metal dish in there. Um, but like the walls of your microwave are metal, and they're obviously not exploding all the time. So there's some there's a combo of myth and nuance in play. Yeah. Yeah, but boy, I'd be lost without my microwave. Same. I mean, I I there's a lot of reheating that happens in our microwave, including the coffee that I didn't finish and now it's cold and I wanted to be warm again. Uh, that kind of stuff I keep thinking about, like how revolutionary it was and what it would take to feel that same thing regarding cooking today. And I was like, it really is like if someone was like, no, you're going to cook in a hologram, like it would Yeah. So which is the most subtle Bob's Burger's reference I have ever made be made on the show? Um, for any anybody that listens, you know what I'm talking about. Um, But yeah, I just it's an astonishing um thing to think about how quickly it changed the way people perceived the work of the kitchen and changed it. And it's very you know in those Kitchen of Tomorrow newsreels. Well, and it also makes me think about how um, like there are a lot of folks who are microwave is a lot more accessible than any other way you might like people who are in shelters or emergency housing a lot of times like that's that's what you've got, Like you can't have the things, um, and so that like it feeds into criticisms that people have about convenience foods, and it's like for a lot of folks, the convenience foods are the ones that are available to them, so chill well, and they're also like if you were on a very very tight budget and just starting out a household and for some reason you did not have a stove war range. A microwave is usually a lot more affordable, um and an easier way to like make sure you have access to hot food than if you had to buy an entire new, much larger appliance. UM. And now there you know. You can get a microwave for quite cheap these days. It may not have very many bells and whistles, but you can get your food warm, um microwaves. How we love you, Ruth Wakefield. Yeah, I feel some ways about her, And I will tell you a story. And I didn't include this in the episode because it was a story that was given to like a leisure magazine anonymously by someone who said they worked in her restaurant. So it's not one that you can easily verify. But it falls so much in line with all of the other things that people have said about her over the years that I I think it's it bears merit to discuss it. Um. According to this, Ruth, in running the toll house in was a real stickler about employees not taking any food. Yeah, which I have feelings about to begin with, that's a whole other thing. Um, Like at the end of the night, if there were leftovers, they went in the trash. Yeah, which I feel ways about. Yes, I think we both do, um, And I'm sure in her head that was part of quality control and like no one will ever see anything from toll House that's been reheated, blah blah blah blah. But anyway, there's also some food safety stuff that's legitimate. But that's totally valid. Yes, But apparently there was a night, according to this interview, um, where Ruth was not in the restaurant for some reason, and so several of the employees were like, I would really like some cookies at the end of the shift, and so they had asked the kitchen like, hey, when the when we closed for the night, whatever's left, will you just put him aside for us? And they then ate them after the restaurant had closed and Ruth came in and according to this person, she did not say a word. She looked each of them in the eye, looked at each of their plates, never said anything about it. But the next week there was a deduction in all of their pay for the amount of the cookies they had eaten. And I'm like Ruth for real. I mean, first of all, if you think about a restaurant's overhead for like what even if it were a couple dozen cookies a successful restaurant, it's nothing. And if you have good staff, treat them nicely so they'll stay your stat like it's it's striking to me how many former employees wanted to talk to the press all the time right right well, And it's in addition to the like kindness and fairness to staff. Food waste is a big problem. It is a big problem about hunger. It's a big problem about climate. Like it's a big problem that's threaded through a lot of stuff. There are some misperceptions about what grocery store chains will and will not participate in food rescue programs, which gets on right, because if you're running one of those, it's hard to get started. And I don't want people to be discouraged from approaching an entire chain because people have wrongfully said on Twitter that they don't do that, but like that kind of stuff being like nope, you can't even eat that, We're just gonna throw it in the trash. I hate it. Me too. I get it when it's based in the fact of that has been sitting out for more than four hours, it's no longer safe to eat, or that was on somebody's plate, and that's a hepatitis risk, Like that's legitimate shower. But these are literally cookies that would have been already have have a longer yeah life, Like you can eat a cookie that's been sitting out generally. Yeah, And they weren't given they were literally like put them aside, whatever's left over, because we would like to eat them instead of throw them out. Yeah, they do have a very nice shelf life. There what my mother would send me as a care package at various points in my life. And also what one of the things that my mother did before I was born. My dad was in the army and he was stationed in Alaska, and like me, as we just discussed and we were talking about Ernest Jackton. I don't like the cold, I don't like the dark. Neither did my mom, and so she would bake chocolate chip cookies every week to make the house smell nice. There's almost nothing that smells better. Do you have a favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe? I do, and it is my mom's and it's similar to the toll house recipe from the back of the package. I don't put nuts in there because I don't want them. Um, But like there's some dry ingredient measurements that are slightly different than what's on the back of the package currently, So like, I don't know if it's an older version of the back of the package Nestlee recipe or if it's something that my mom fine tunes. Um. But I generally put extra chocolate chips in there instead of nuts, so I have a trick. My favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe is a riff on the one from the Wookie Cookies cookbook, which was like the first official Star Wars cookbook. Um, which is a delicious chocolate chip cookie. It is made with a cinnamon in it, and it is half milk chocolate chips and half dark chocolate chips. Um. But listen, I normally am gonna always want salty and buttery things, but when I want something sweet, I really want it cloying lee sweet, so dark chocolate get on out of here and instead goes in butter scotch chips. Um. It's such a rich and beautiful cookie at that point because the cinnamon in the butter scots just elevate the whole thing and give it like layers of flavor. And can I tell you a story that unites both halfs of of this episode. Yes. Um. So, when I was living in Somerville, Massachusetts, we were on the top floor of a brick building that did not have a lot of shade, and our kitchen became so unbelievably hot that we would go to great links to figure out how we would eat for the day without having to turn the oven on fair which microwave right. So one day we were at the grocery store and my spouse, who I love, decided he wanted chocolate chip cookies. And it was nineties something degrees, which meant it was well beyond a hundred in the kitchen, and I was like, why are you going to turn the oven on? This makes no sense. He said, I just really want them, and I said okay, And so we got home, we unloaded all the groceries, and again I love him, he left the chocolate chip bag in the kitchen, so when he went to make his cookies, it was liquid um. And so what he made was chocolate cookies with the chocolate like just infused all through it and that was delicious also still yummy. I don't I think at no point ever again after that, before we moved out of the apartment, did he ever want to turn the oven on when it was that hot? I love to bake in thankfully. Um Last year at Christmas I got a much nicer range because the one that we got was like when we first moved into this house was like the very cheapest gas range we could get, and it just like, even though it was new at the time, it was it was such a low end model that like it didn't always heat consistently, it was just And now I feel like for the last year and a half I have had like the bliss of a really reliable, good oven and like it's cookie time all the time. Yeah. Yeah. This week on the show, we talked about Ivy lad Better Lee, who represented a lot of people and industries and organizations on what I would just as a personal feeling, I feel like was the wrong side, like when a lot of miners get shot at or killed in the middle of a labor dispute, going to represent the minds Uh, Sure, there's an argument that everybody involved deserves to have some uh some you know, competent representation. But man, there were just so many things in his background that were like and then this industry that was, you know, forcing workers in the mind to build them mine, but only paying them for substances they actually mind, so like any work they were doing building the mind went unpaid. Uh, then making an argument to be like why that was an actually good and reasonable thing to do. I was not fond of that at all. No, I mean, it's it's interesting, right, I'm fascinated by his work and in some ways, like I just have an aversion even though I know at this point it is a part of the world we live in. I'm I'm fascinated and picked out by the manipulation of public opinion in general. Yeah, but in his case, I mean, there were obviously it's there are times when he was he seemed to be trying to do things that were, um not horrible, but then other times where he was perfectly comfortable sidling up to people who were doing things that were in fact objectively horrible pretty bad. Yeah, yeah, Well, and some of his things that seemed more more positive as far as a contribution to the world still had this sort of UM. Underside to them were like his work with the Red Cross was about increasing knowledge of the Red Cross, increasing public support of the Red Cross. The work that the Red Cross was doing during the war was so critically important, but it was also about making the United States and the Allies look good. So it was like there was that layer of motivation to it also. Um. There were a few things that came up in the research for this that we didn't get into in the episode. UM for a number of reasons. One, when his mother and his father met, his mother was disturbingly young. She was twelve. She was not fourteen yet when she had her first child, and none of the biographical treatments that I have read really discussed that at all. But I was like, holy cow, I know married ages have varied over time, but she was so young when they met that he wasn't allowed to court her in the parlor. He was teaching her Bible verses in the kitchen. And that, oh, that all creaked me out a lot. I UM, yeah, and that like we have no I have no not if if her feelings on that are really documented anywhere. I I have not ever been able to find them. UM. Where I read about that was in the only biography of him that exists, which was written in the sixties after his personal papers were given to Princeton. Before that, it was really hard for anybody to find enough information on him to really write a biography. Um that first press release. It's not really mentioned by that first biographer at all that I found, And so that seems like something that has been something a connection that people made later on, possibly because that was written in the nineteen sixties. And so I found it really interesting that this piece that a lot of people are like, this is a hallmark of his career, just doesn't appear in his biography unless I totally missed it somewhere. Well, it's possible to write, like, I wonder how much we think about a press release as a an essential part of any publicity campaign or pr campaign, Whereas then it still probably would have been common, but not like you can't do it without one of these. So it may not have seemed as momentous through the lens of his initial biographer does when we look back and see, oh, now literally everyone does it, and you started it, yeah, and uh, and newspapers printing stuff from press releases without questioning it like that continues to be a thing that happens today and continues to be a source of like sekewed information coming out today. Yeah, for sure. The last thing that I was trying to figure out how to put into the episode and I just could not put that. I couldn't find a good place for it to go. He appeared before a lot of different committees and investigations that was like, Hey, this huge incident happened. We're trying to get to the bottom of what happened. It seems like this Ivy League guy was maybe manipulating the press. We should talk to him. And very often the questioning started with what is your profession, and repeatedly Ivy Lee's answer was basically, I don't know. Um like his answer answered that before. Yeah, his answer would be uh, sort of like, well, it's hard to describe, and then he would kind of talk around what he was doing for a little bit, and you know, I can sort of I can. I can definitely see having that happened once. But maybe as it became clear that he was going to be called before a committee over and over again over the course of his career, it might have been good to put together a brief statement to describe his profession, but he didn't want to because then they could ask follow ups. Um At the transcripts for the the hearing about his association with the with the Nazis and the German government. Um, parts of it are like really just trying to be like, what is your job though? Can you tell us what your job is? Well? I advise people, okay, but how? And then I don't know if anybody else listens to the podcast maintenance phase. It's a podcast I really love. And a thing that happens on that show sometimes is that one of the hosts, Michael, will send the other host, Aubrey Um, something to read aloud, and Aubrey's voice sometimes we'll just have this like increasing escalation of horror and bafflement at what she's reading. And that was what my brain was doing as I was reading a lot of his testimony, because it would be like it would start out like, yes, I was working with this Die Trust, and it would just get farther and farther into something that was unacceptable. Yeah, I was telling the Die Trust how to maybe make Americans stop boycotting them, and my mind would just be like this increasingly uh loud uh, and an astonished and horrified statement of what was just apparently coming out of his mouth and seemingly just not not really batting an eye over what he was saying out loud in front of a congressional committee. Yeah, I wonder, I mean, we'll never know, right, we can't go back in time and interview him, And I wonder if his is one of those cases where he maybe got into the business true believing that he was going to uphold that statement he wrote about, like no, we're going to tell the truth, We're going to be transparent, blah blah blah. But then you know, people become I don't want to say people become jaded, because I think sometimes some of those shifts in like your integrity can happen in such tiny increments that you don't realize it's happening over time, and then it's like too late, and you've internalized it as a normalcy and it's just like, yeah, I listen, I don't really know what I do. People ask me to help, and I help, and no, I don't know. Uh. Yeah, I think they hated Jews. I don't know. I just wanted them to look good. To the US, Like what like if he told that to his original nineteen o six self, what would that conversation have been. Yeah, it's a good question. I there I read a couple of references that allow edged that he told ig Farben that they needed to cut their ties with the Nazi Party, which would not have been possible for ig Farban to do. But I also was like, I don't actually see that reflected in these statements there. Um, there are a couple of things where I feel like people really want to try to rehabilitate him because he was such a foundational part of a whole industry that still exists today, and that there are things that float around about him that are like not totally accurate. Like there are people that say, yeah, he was totally distributing all kinds of Nazi propaganda in the US. That doesn't seem to be true. Um, But at the same time, I just do not agree that you can give him a pass on representing representing the Nazi government via ig Farben. That I don't think you can give somebody a pass on that. Well it it's telling right in that testimony what he says is I told them that like anti jewishness would not fly in the US. Not this is wrong. What the hell you gotta stop doing it? Oh? I told him they couldn't tell you they do that, Like that's a very different situation. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, many years ago, I went to a Stuff you Should Know Live show, and I think the topic was public relations, UM, and he mentioned he being Josh or check I don't remember which of them, mentioned somebody somebody in the long ago history of public relations, and somebody cheered, and Josh was like, you're gonna want to take that back anyway, if you're publicist. This episode was not a personal slide against you. UM. Anyway. So it's Friday. I hope everybody has a great weekend lined up, whatever is happening on your plates. I hope if anybody sends some spin your way that is blatantly untrue, that you're able to see through it. Uh. Send us a note if you like for a history podcast that I heart radio dot com and we will be around tomorrow with a Saturday classic and Monday with a brand new episode. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I heart radio, app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.