The lengthy anonymity of the Gerber child additionally ensured that there was at the least one pretender to the throne. Within the Nineteen Forties, one household sued the corporate, claiming that its youngster was the newborn on the label. Testifying in courtroom, Ms. Smith disclosed her mannequin’s id, and the go well with was determined in Gerber’s favor.
Ms. Cook dinner, who had been conscious of her function since early childhood, saved her personal counsel. After transferring along with her household to Orlando, Fla., within the late Nineteen Thirties, she earned a bachelor’s diploma in English from Southern Methodist College in Dallas, adopted by a grasp’s within the discipline from the College of South Florida. She taught junior excessive and highschool English, turning into the division chairwoman of Hillsborough Excessive College in Tampa, Fla.
As a younger trainer, Ms. Cook dinner, frightened of the beautiful model of disdain at which adolescents excel, selected by no means to reveal her childish id. Solely within the late Nineteen Seventies, with Gerber’s commemoration of the drawing’s fiftieth anniversary, did she publicly reveal herself as its topic. Her college students, she later mentioned, have been intrigued.
Ms. Cook dinner’s husband, James Cook dinner, a criminologist who was a serious with the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Workplace in Tampa, died in 2004. Her survivors embrace three daughters, Jan Cook dinner, Carol Legarreta and Kathy Cook dinner; a son, Clifford; eight grandchildren; and 9 great-grandchildren.
After retiring from educating, Ms. Cook dinner wrote a sequence of self-published crime novels. She grew amiably reconciled to life because the Gerber child, granting interviews and showing on the tv quiz present “To Inform the Fact.”
Bogart was a small lingering irritant, however he might be borne.
Ms. Cook dinner’s long-ago likeness stays a cultural touchstone to at the present time. Lately, Gerber, now a subsidiary of Nestlé, has held an annual babies’ photo contest, awarding a grand prize of $25,000 and utilizing the winner in its promoting.
As soon as she recognized herself because the Gerber child — and because the mom of 4 in addition — Ms. Cook dinner left herself open to a query that she needed to reply cagily. She gave simply such a solution when The Globe and Mail, the Canadian newspaper, put the query to her in a 1987 interview:
Did she feed her personal kids Gerber child meals?
There was a slight pause.
“Not completely,” Ms. Cook dinner replied.
