Happy Monday, again. I look forward to Mondays because they’re my 52 Chances a year, in which I get to share Memories of My Mom with you.
Today’s the 44-year anniversary of Mom’s most influential TV appearance, on The Phil Donahue Show (filmed July 7, 1981 – before common internet and social media platforms existed). The episode aired nationally and internationally for several months afterward.
From that one episode, our family’s modest little dining room table operation found out that mass exposer, for which social media influencers now blindly strive, can be both a blessing and a curse. We weren’t prepared for the Phil Donahue effect – an avalanche of a million letters that came in response to that appearance.
At that time, there was just me and my two sisters, who were around to help Mom and Dad (plus, their regular, full-time secretary). They had to temporarily hire some of our friends, part-time, to help with the influx of mail.
The Phil Donahue Show was an historic event for our hometown’s small post office, to say the least! It was serving less than 5,000 citizens when it was inundated with about a million letters for Mom, throughout the rest of the summer and fall – while the show continued to air in different states and other countries.
It was unquestionably the biggest milestone event in our family-run, dining-room-table, cottage operation, which had only started 8 years earlier! At the time, Mom had a “series” of 5 “Secret RecipesTM” cookbooks in print and her monthly newsletter. But her copycat recipe collection continually grew.
Early in 1977, she began her first cookbook “series” with The Secret Restaurant Recipes Book (aka: “Book 1”) – a revised version of her very first, limited edition, fast foods “test cookbook” from October 1976. Later in 1977, Mom was quick to follow it up with The Second Helping of Secret Recipes (aka: “Book 2”).
The hunger from her fans for more “copycat recipes” continued to grow. Over the next three years, Mom published three more hits – each one unique and fresh: Eating Out At Home (aka: “Book 3”), in 1978; Top Secret Recipes Al’a Carte (aka: “Book 4”), in 1979; and The Secrets Of Homemade Groceries (aka: “Book 5”), in 1980.
Between the five books, in this series, Mom had developed over 1,400 imitations, covering 59 restaurants (from Arby’s to Yummyland), 83 brands of grocery products (from A&P to Wonder), 22 famous hotel chains and inns, 12 different department stores dining rooms and cafeterias, 15 candies and carnival eats, and treats from 7 tourist hot spots!
The growing success of Mom’s copycat cookery concept led to enormous opportunities, doing radio and TV talk shows all over North America, opening up even more doors of opportunity. Word spread like wildfire about this smalltown, Michigan homemaker turned Secret RecipesTM Detective. The Phil Donahue Show persistently asked her to be on their show.
After she finally agreed, Mom couldn’t release anything new, other than her monthly newsletter. The project she had been working on was put on hold because of the enormous response to that show and a law suit from the Stouffer company, ordering Mom to revise all five of her cookbooks where she had imitated their products.
Eventually Mom was able to start another cookbook series, beginning with Gloria Pitzer’s Better Cookery Cookbook in May 1982. While I was growing up, surrounded by and involved in the “dining-room-table, cottage operation”, I didn’t truly understand Mom’s deep-rooted love for all of it.
Like a mother has for her child, that’s the love she had for everything she published. Then I experienced it, myself (2015 through 2017), when I collaborated with her to rewrite her 1982 cookbook, using my 3rd edition copy (from May 1983), in hopes to reach a new digital audience.
I think Mom favored that cookbook more than the others because it was one of her most popular, coming off of the tidal wave of fame she received from that FIRST Donahue appearance. She revised it with smaller “Best of…” versions a couple of other times, too.
Gloria Pitzer’s Cookbook – The Best of the Recipe Detective (Balboa Press; Jan. 2018, p. 299). [A revised reprint of Gloria Pitzer’s Better Cookery Cookbook (Secret RecipesTM, St. Clair, MI; May 1983, 3rd Edition)].
THE SURPRISE – A DREAM COME TRUE!
IF YOU’VE EVER seen a million letters, you know how we felt when we tried to handle the overwhelming response!
It was exhausting! Our home, which was both our office and our sanctuary, became like a factory, with people helping us to process the mail, eventually having to return thousands of the orders to the customers with our deepest regrets that we could not, in all fairness to them, delay their order.
The onslaught of mail had forced us to do this. We were all working from 7 AM until 1 or 2 AM the next morning just to open and read the mail. Our phone bill had been buried in some of that mail and in a month’s time, being something like 23 to 24 days behind in opening the mail, our phone was shut off for non-payment of our bill.
As soon as we realized what the mail was doing to us, we tried to get Donahue’s people to stop the continued scheduled showings of our appearance. But that show remained on their repeat schedule for almost a year, playing in the Panama Canal zone, Greenland, Iceland, Australia and on hundreds of small town stations.
Most of the letters requested a sheet of “free” recipes that were included with the order blank for a self-addressed stamped envelope to us. The offer would have been good for us, if it had only been shown that one time – the day on which we appeared on the show…
But for nearly a year afterward, the requests still came, as did the complaints and the threats to report us to postal authorities for not having sent those “free” recipes, tore us apart emotionally and physically! Some people did not include their self-addressed-stamped envelope.
Some envelopes were addressed to themselves, such as Joe Smith, but in care of OUR address instead of THEIR address. It was a confusing mess!
Some people wrote threatening letters that they hadn’t received their orders and were turning us over to the postmaster general as frauds! I laid my head on my desk many a time, in tears of anguish and fatigue…
One of Mom’s fondest memories before she passed was of her relationship, over the years, with the Phil Donahue Show people. At first, it was an overwhelming and exhausting experience, even devastating at one point – so much so that she swore she’d never do another national TV show.
However, various producers of other news/talk shows persuaded her to do several more appearances. She also did Donahue’s show, again, in 1993, smashing records for transcript requests!
Eventually, however, it grew into one of the best things that ever happened to Mom, as the Secret RecipesTM Detective. The Donahue effect became one of the most treasured times of her life – opening doors and creating connections she never expected.
It was hard to see the forest through the trees, at first, as we were swathed in mail chaos, sending out hundreds of thousands of Mom’s “free recipes and product-ordering information” sheets in all of the SASEs (Self-Addressed Stamped Envelopes) that came in.
There were also a lot of new newsletter subscriptions that generated from those “free sheet” mailings, so once a month (for a while) Mom and Dad needed extra help just in putting address labels on the increased number of newsletter issues that were mailed out, as her subscriptions grew.
Mom’s copycat recipes revolution took the nation and world by storm – mostly thanks to the Phil Donahue Show! There was nothing else like it at the time. Unique creativity stands out and grabs attention. It’s the kind of thing that makes anything go viral these days.
Ever since her early cookbooks on the subject were first released in the mid-1970s, Mom referred to her copycat imitations as her solutions to “eating out, at home”.
“That”, she’d add, “no longer means hot dogs on the grill, in the backyard!” However, did you know that’s the favorite food choice for Independence Day celebrations AND this is National Hot Dog Month?
My Cup Runneth Over and I Can’t Find My Mop (Secret RecipesTM, St. Clair, MI; Dec. 1989, pp. 95-96)
THE DONAHUE SHOW
THOUGH MANY EVENTS drift through my mind, surprisingly enough, it is the ‘Donahue’ show I recall most frequently, when I consider turning points.
We were settling down in our new home in St. Clair, with the office in the basement. We outgrew that arrangement in the short time and then rented a large office up town. The books became more successful than we anticipated in the newsletter circulation was growing to over 10,000 subscribers…
We were receiving a few hundred letters a day, which will usually do, from the radio shows and newspaper stories that I have been involved with as a consultant on franchise foods. In the spring of 1981, Carol Haddix, who had transferred from the Detroit Free Press to become food editor at the Chicago Tribune, ran a story about us.
The Donahue show people called to request that we appear on their show as soon as we could arrange it. We had just finished a television appearance with PM magazine out of Detroit and another with Channel 4 in Detroit for the noon news and the response was so overwhelming that we were hoping to put off any further publicity until we could take care of the current response…
The Donahue show appearance will always remain the single most important part of our growing, of opening many doors that would have been otherwise close to us in the field and for allowing me to let my light shine. Now to keep on shining!
So on July 6th, Paul and I flew to Chicago, staying at the Hyatt O’Hare, and did the Donahue show vibe, for an entire hour, on July 7, flying back that same afternoon…
The next day, however, 15,000 letters were waiting for us at the St. Clair post office. And every day for four months we picked up thousands of letters, having received by Christmas, well over 1 million letters requesting information on how to acquire our books, which were still available only by mail from our address…
Thanks for visiting! I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about my memories of my mom, her memories, and other related things. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email me at therecipedetective@outlook.com. You can also find me on Facebook: @TheRecipeDetective.
IN CLOSING…
In honor of TODAY, being National Macaroni Day, here’s Mom’s copycat recipe for “Macaroni & Cheese, Inspired by Boston Chicken’s”; as seen in… The Best Of The First 20 Years (Secret RecipesTM, Marysville, MI; April 1994, p. 58). As always, I’m asking only for proper credit if you care to re-share it.
P.S. Food-for-thought until next Monday…
July observes… National Baked Bean Month, National Culinary Arts Month, National Grilling Month, National Horseradish Month, National Ice Cream Month, Independent Retailer Month, National Blueberry Month, National Picnic Month, and National Peach Month.
This week is still observing… The Dog Days of Summer (always July 3rd – Aug. 11th).
Today is also… National Strawberry Sundae Day.
Tomorrow is… National Freezer Pop Day and National Chocolate with Almonds Day.
Wednesday, July 9th, is… National Sugar Cookie Day.
Thursday, July 10th, is… National Pina Colada Day.
Friday, July 11th, is… National Rainier Cherry Day, National Blueberry Muffin Day, and National Mojito Day.
Saturday, July 12th, is… National Pecan Pie Day, Paper Bag Day, and Eat Your Jell-O Day.
Sunday, July 13th, is… National French Fry Day, National Beans ‘N’ Franks Day, and National Delaware Day.
Have a great week!
…27 down and 25 to go!
