Quotes from Susan Marks

For some, the Betty Crocker Kitchens experience was a tearful one. "Betty Crocker isn't one woman,". visitors were told, "but many women who work under her name." ... People don't usually travel all the way to the North Pole, meet the elves, and then find out the truth about Santa. But what happened at the Betty Crocker Kitchen was "worse because Betty was their hero.

Receptionists [for the Betty Crocker Kitchen tours] had tissues and sympathy for guests grappling with the cold reality that it was impossible to meet Betty Crocker.

McMein's] portrait was enthusiastically approved, then unveiled with great ceremony in November of 1936... According the General Mills Historian James Gray, McMein gave Betty "a fine Nordic brow and shape of skull, a jaw of slightly Slavic resolution and features that might be claimed contentedly by various European groups - eyes, Irish; nose, classic Roman - the perfect composite of the twentieth-century American woman.

And incidents of clandestine cake mix use were not isolated! Busybodies excused themselves from parties just long enough to rifle through the kitchen trash cans for empty cake mix boxes.