Talk:Gerry Thomas

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By Roy Rivenburg, Los Angeles Times

In today's image-mad world, what you do in life has become passe. It's what people think you do that matters. And, don't worry, everyone's too busy to check your resume for embellishments. Perhaps no one illustrates this new world better than the dearly departed octogenarian who claimed to have invented the frozen TV dinner.

Gerry Thomas, who died July 18, regaled reporters with tales of refrigerated railcars crisscrossing the nation, carrying 520,000 pounds of surplus turkey. As he told it, when panicky Swanson executives asked their employees for ideas on how to unload the frozen birds, Thomas dreamed up the idea of a frozen turkey meal, designed the tray and coined the name — TV dinner.

Great story, but it didn't happen. According to Thomas, who worked as a salesman for Swanson in the 1950s, unusually warm weather in late 1951 reduced Thanksgiving demand for turkeys, creating a surplus of the frozen birds. But 1951 was one of the coldest winters on record. And ex-Swanson employees say the company owned eight stories of freezer space in Omaha and wouldn't have needed refrigerated trains to store any surplus fowl.

In 2003, when The Times asked Thomas about discrepancies in his tale, he said the railcar story was "a metaphor."

But obituary writers overlooked that revelation when memorializing Thomas this month as the genius behind the TV dinner. (Some writers also said Thomas has a spot on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Also not true.)

One of the dirty little secrets of journalism is that reporters rarely have time to investigate every claim people make about their pasts. If you want to embellish, just fool one reporter for one article, then you can use it to show other reporters that your story checked out. It also helps to adopt such accouterments as the cufflinks Thomas wore shaped like TV dinner trays. Never mind that Swanson family members, historians and frozen-food industry officials from the early 1950s have all contradicted Thomas' tale. Or that, in 1944, the W.L. Maxson Co. created the real first frozen dinner, which was sold to the Navy and later to the airlines. Or that FrigiDinner, not Thomas, devised the first aluminum tray for frozen meals in 1947. Or that several of Thomas' former colleagues say he had little or nothing to do with Swanson's product. A former Swanson publicist, when asked about phony claims of credit, recalled a remark made by President Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs fiasco: "There's an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan."

Indeed. The line was used in a 1951 movie, "The Desert Fox." And the movie, in turn, swiped it from a 1942 diary entry by Benito Mussolini's son-in-law, Count Galeazzo Ciano.

Lord knows where he got it.

"an unexpected and surprisingly vindictive debate"

The Arizona Republic

August 13, 2005 A TV DINNER DUST-UP: WHO KNEW?

Ever hear of "Strato-Plates," frozen meals created by Maxson Food Systems Inc., in the 1940s and served to airplane fliers? For that matter, do you remember Maxson Food Systems? How about "Frigi-Dinners"? Now there's a catchy name.

If you do, congratulations on your sharp memory or trivia prowess. Those long-forgotten delicacies are considered precursors to the terrifically successful Swanson TV Dinner and have returned from the icebox of history after the death last month of Gerry Thomas of Paradise Valley.

The July 18 passing of Thomas, for years credited for his role in producing the frozen dinner for C.A. Swanson & Sons in the 1950s, has touched off an unexpected and surprisingly vindictive debate over who really created the convenience food product.

A Los Angeles Times headline writer went as far to dub Thomas, who also served a term on the Paradise Valley Town Council, a "charlatan."

The July 31 Times opinion piece written by Roy Rivenburg picks apart Thomas' anecdote about inventing the dinner gimmick in the early 1950s as a way to get rid of surplus turkey meat. But even if Thomas took some liberties with the story line over the years, dismissing him as a fraud seems wrong, particularly if he was the one responsible for the brainstorm to christen the new product the "TV dinner."

It was that "TV dinner" name and marketing concept -- you could eat it in front that newfangled contraption called the television set and not miss a minute of Hopalong Cassidy or Milton Berle -- that took hold of the public's fancy, appetite and pocketbook. A representative of Pinnacle Foods International, which now owns the Swanson name, told The Arizona Republic that the company still gives Thomas credit for the name.

But it is not hard to believe that, like many corporate decisions and inventions, the frozen dinner was a collaborative effort. In any event, Thomas' Paradise Valley neighbors, friends and acquaintances have a lot to remember him for: his genial personality, World War II adventures, the brief local political career and his many years in the U.S. food industry. And, yes, for having something to do with the frozen dinner. Maybe someday America will find out for sure who named the concoction.

After all, nobody is fighting over credit for naming the Frigi-Dinner, are they?

NV Researcher (talk) 00:02, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

More from Arizona Republic

Letter to the Editor, 17 August 2005 TV DINNER'S SUPPOSED 'INVENTOR' WAS PART OF A TEAM

In response to "TV dinners cook up controversy" (The Arizona Republic, Friday):

I somewhat knew Gerry Thomas, but I never questioned his story about inventing the TV dinner. It didn't seem to serve any useful purpose.

Now, for some background. I was born and raised in Omaha, Neb., where the C.A. Swanson Co. began. I didn't know Carl Swanson, the founder, but I did know his two sons, Gilbert and Clarke. Their children were contemporaries and good friends of mine.

I also lived near Ralph Sharpe, who worked for Swanson and was in charge of the frozen food operations. To the best of my recollection, the Swanson brothers and Sharpe were responsible for the TV dinner and for perfecting the frozen chicken pot pie.

I don't question that Thomas worked for Swanson, or that he had some involvement in the development and marketing of the product, but he was -- at best -- part of a team.

When Campbell Soup Co. purchased Swanson, Sharpe moved to Philadelphia and, I believe, headed the frozen food operation there. Ironically, Sharpe and his wife, Garnet, retired to Carefree and both died prior to 1999, when Thomas' story apparently really got legs.

I wonder what Thomas' answer would have been if I had ever asked him if he knew Sharpe?

-- E. Thomas Morrow Scottsdale

Philadelphia Inquirer article

"Was the TV-Dinner Story Overcooked?" By Michelle Roberts Associated Press 5 August 2005 The Philadelphia Inquirer

This much is certain: When C.A. Swanson & Sons began selling a frozen turkey dinner with peas and sweet potatoes more than 50 years ago, homemakers 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 former Swanson salesman and marketing executive 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 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, stands by the story that Thomas 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.

That was the oral tradition when Pinnacle bought Swanson from the bankrupt Vlasic Foods International Inc. in 2001, said Kelley Maggs, a spokesman for the Mountain Lakes, N.J., company. "We don't have any reason to disbelieve that history."

However, Campbell Soup Co., which bought Swanson in 1955 and owned it until 1998, used Betty Cronin to represent the product during its 35th and 40th anniversaries in 1989 and 1994. Cronin worked for Swanson in the 1950s and helped figure out how to produce the frozen dinners.

Cronin, who lives in Pennsauken, said this week that Thomas had nothing to do with the TV dinner. "I never saw him, and I was working on the products."

Cronin said Clarke Swanson, one of the brothers who ran the 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's wife, Susan, said in an interview shortly after Thomas's 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.

Thomas first became widely associated with the development of the TV dinner after his induction into the Frozen Food Industry Hall of Fame in 1998.

Nevin Montgomery, president of the National Frozen & Refrigerated Foods Association in Harrisburg, which administers the industry hall of fame, said yesterday that the first he heard of Thomas' involvement in the TV dinner was during that induction ceremony.

"Gerry told a convincing story," Montgomery said.

Vlasic Foods International picked up on that story with the help of a public relations firm and used him as the face for the 45th anniversary of the product in 1999.

Murray Kessler, who was president of Swanson then, said Thomas was convincing. "Whether it's true or not, that man believed he came up with the idea," Kessler said. Kessler, who is president of U.S. Smokeless Tobacco Co., in Greenwich, Conn., said it was not unusual for salesmen to come up with ideas and then hand them off to others for development.

A. Jack Dale, a Campbell Soup retiree who started selling frozen dinners in 1955, does not believe that is the case with Thomas and the TV dinner. The Radnor resident said Thomas was never mentioned as having had anything to do with the product.

Inquirer staff writer Harold Brubaker contributed to this article.

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.4.250.31 (talk) 03:44, 23 February 2008 (UTC) 

75.16.86.252 AKA Roy R?

Mr. R, as Patrick "Patterico" Frey has pointed out in his blog, you should be proud of your record of 'debunking' octogenarians named Thomas, shortly before they shuffle off their mortal coils -- and of course for piling on immediately afterward. So, why are you hiding behind the IP address? Afraid of being banned & blocked again by senior wikipedians?

Facts@MT.org (talk) 21:03, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

Edits by 75.16.86.25

75.16.86.252 keeps editing this piece to draw attention to the published work of a former LA Times reporter and humor columnist, Roy Rivenburg, who wrote an article in 2003 that purported to debunk Gerry Thomas. Rivenburg later penned an editorial in the Times about Thomas after he died in 2005 -- the headline called him a "charlatan.'

75.16.86.252 has not identified him- or herself, but others here have noted the editor behind this IP address may be the reporter. If so, he would be promoting his own work in violation of Wikipedia policies, in addition to failing the test of having a neutral point of view about the subject.

I have edited the piece to reflect the reporter's take on Thomas, e.g., he never ate the TV dinners, and gave credit to others for their contributions, without having the article focus unduly on the rather strange controversy that the reporter created, which addresses with the utmost gravity a subject most people would agree is rather trivial. It's akin to an in-depth analysis of who deserves the credit for "inventing" the toothpick umbrellas in tropical drinks.

The reporter seems to have a history of trying to make a name for himself "debunking" men in their 80s, and then landing on them with both feet as soon as they die, (see the edits by 'Rivenburg' regarding Michel Thomas) Oddly, both of his targets are named Thomas, both died in 2005, and the reporter's work has been the subject of extraordinary controversy on Wikipedia.

In the case of Michel Thomas, the reporter was sued for defamation, and the subject of his article, whom Rivenburg portrayed as a charlatan who lied about his WWII experiences, was subsequently awarded a prestigious medal for combat bravery for his WWII service -- several Senators and other dignitaries presented the award to him at the WWII Memorial when he was 90 years old.

If 75.16.86.252 continues to revert / undo these edits, I suggest this article should be submitted for arbitration with a view to having 75.16.86.252 banned or blocked, as Rivenburg was from the Michel Thomas article.

Swansonian (talk) 00:23, 23 February 2008 (UTC)