I’ve been listening to a lot of Stan Freberg lately. There’s a sketch where Jesse White, as an unscrupulous record company chief tries to get a radio programmer to promote his latest single (The Old Payola Roll Blues). The programmer refuses the cash bribe, so the Maytag guy says, “What do you need? Some dental work? Trip to Vegas? Pre-1959 cranberry?”
I was born in May of 1956, so I don’t have clear memories of Thanksgiving dinner in 1958. Does ANYONE here know what makes that funny (besides the fact that it’s Freberg)?
On November 9, 1959, Arthur S. Flemming, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare announced that some cranberries grown in Oregon and Washington State had been found to have been contaminated with aminotriazole, a weed killer that had been found to cause cancer in rats. When questioned, he said that if a housewife is unable to determine the origin of fresh or canned cranberries, “to be on the safe side, she doesn’t buy.” Cranberries were pulled from grocery shelves and sales dropped precipitously. Coming shortly before Thanksgiving, this caused a crisis in the industry. After testing it was found that very few shipments of cranberries were contaminated. It was also doubtful that aminotriazole, in the amounts likely to be ingested by a human being eating cranberries, presented a real health risk. Both Flemming and Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson made a point of announcing that they would have cranberries with their Thanksgiving dinners. By Christmas, large quantities of cranberries were available bearing labels saying that they had either been tested by the Food and Drug Administration or otherwise certified safe. However, the “cranberry scare of 1959” caused damage that it took the cranberry industry many years to recover from. (Source: Contemporary articles in the New York Times. )
Momentous events, for good or ill, have occurred on my birthday…Kristallnacht, the Fall of the Berlin Wall…but this one? Seriously, I’m old enough to remember this, and it does vaguely pinged my memory. But if you’d asked me, I’d probably not have remembered it.
