Hall of Fame
Marjorie Thompson Flint
by Helen Hatton
We couldn’t produce a television special on Marjorie Thompson Flint, that would come close in time or energy, or the total hours of Kraft live 60-second television commercials that she worked on. And, believe me, that’s only part of the program. There’s a lot more! You won’t change the channel on Marjorie. What a story!
Marjorie graduated from the University of Toronto majoring in Household Science and began work as a junior dietitian in food service at Eaton’s College Street Round Room. She was paid $15 per 60-hour week. The benefits included two meals a day – all in all, not bad for the depression years. She was responsible “in patches”, she told me, for everything from the cake counter to the employee’s cafeteria, because the job really amounted to her dietetic internship.
More often than not, the work week stretched longer than 60 hours. In order to get around the labour laws, female staff members were invited as guests to after-hour events, and of course, had to “help out”, usually dressed in their best evening wear. Marjorie said, “There I was, in pink satin and sequins, stirring punch in the giant stock pot in the kitchen.” She also confessed to me yesterday that “it was during these moments that I always felt like one of the three witches from Macbeth!’
The next segment of Marjorie’s career might be called the “Stress Show”. During the war, Marjorie was Supervisor of Restaurants in Union Station, and was responsible for feeding the thousands of troops that passed through. In spite of rationing, and everyone being tired and hampered most of the time, hot nourishing food always had to be available at all hours of the day and night. For instance, she might have dealt with 300 prisoners of war at 11pm, who couldn’t get off the train, or troops en route, who had to be provisioned. While the food for those on the move usually amounted to sandwiches and hot dogs, Marjorie and her staff also provided hot sit-down meals which usually included hot roast beef, vegetables, and always apple pie, for 250 hungry soldiers at a time.
Marjorie was, of course, concerned about nutrition, but the meals were really governed by the rations, food available, and the quality of staff. She said if you had a good vegetable cook, you got fresh vegetables; otherwise, they came out of a can. She also said that the first army rations issued were almost impossible, and as quoted Lt. Colonel Louis Keene, who was of the opinion that the rations were a holdover from the Crimean War! Incidentally, nutritionists analyzing the military rations at the time did find serious mineral and vitamin deficiencies.
Rations were revised within a year, to include fresh fruit, whole grain cereals, eggs, more milk and canned tomatoes.
With the limited supplies that first year of the war, help was clearly needed. With Marjorie as convener, the Toronto Home Economics Association got involved, and in record time, volunteers produced 40 nutritious food service recipes based on these severely limited rations. They were put to use immediately by a grateful army chef’s school in Brampton.
During this period, the standard uniform of all dietitians was the crisp, white uniform. This went early in the job at Union Station when Marjorie continually found herself mistaken for the washroom attendant. Marjorie confessed to me that during this time, she was terribly keen on joining the air force, but her job feeding the troops was considered essential, and she was not allowed to leave.
Except – she married Arles Flint, once an Olympic diver, but at that time, the chief accountant for the same company. And essential or not, in those days company policy prohibited husbands and wives from working together, so Marjorie left. And like so many other young mothers, she soon found herself going a bit mad with two small children in a tiny flat. But Marjorie’s career soon got going again ghostwriting for her cousin Marie Holmes’ food column, “The Cooking Chat”, which appeared in the Toronto Star.
Then she soon began freelancing in earnest as the food columnist for Saturday Night magazine which, in those days, was a weekly publication, not monthly. She would put her children to bed, and write from 12 midnight to 2am. Marjorie mentioned that a lot of her reader calls were not from “the lady of the house”, but from the lady’s cook, and there were occasionally great arguments about whether recipes would work or not, even though the cook had not even tried them.
Marjorie said, ”This was a golden age for Home Economists. We became advisors on everything new – cake mixes and other packaged foods, detergents, appliances, textiles and how to handle them, sewing machines – whatever it was, the consumer wanted to know all about it. Employment for Home Economists was 100%. Everyone who wanted to work, could!”
In the ‘50’s, when television was young, and everything was shot live, Marjorie was one of the first to prepare food for commercials. She went on to do the Kraft TV commercials, taping an average of 6 new commercials in one day, each week, for over 25 years!
Each commercial was 60 seconds long. So 60 times 6 equals 360 seconds per week, times 52 weeks is 18,720 live seconds per year. Times 25 years equals 468,000 seconds. Divide this by 60 and you get 7,800 minutes of commercials. And that's only what was live. Most of us here know the hours of preparation that go into just one shoot!
To her credit, Marjorie never had any disasters with her commercials. Oh, trays of food once disappeared, and the viewers at home saw crumbs and an empty table attesting to Marjorie’s talent. But if the director called the wrong shot, and the camera panned to the wrong table, tough luck for him, she said. Her food, settings, and models were always there on time.
Dorothy Ferguson, who assisted Marjorie for 15 years on the commercials, did describe one trip. They were driving downtown to the studio with hats, gloves and lemon meringue pies on the back seat of the car. A rear-ender occurred. However, it didn’t happen on the set, and the commercials went on that day!
Marjorie really was a pioneer in this area – no one had ever done this type of work before. Dorothy Ferguson commented that Marjorie set the taste level for the Canadian table. Women noticed and copied her food setups, props, parties and cheese trays. Viewers could, and did, send in for the recipes; 30 to 40 recipes were printed in a very popular monthly digest.
This remarkable woman retired in 1985 from a career that spanned some 55 years and has not slowed down in the least. Marjorie is currently writing a book about her family history, and was recently given a prestigious award from the Ontario Ministry of Culture and Communication for her extensive volunteer work with the United Empire Loyalists. At the meetings, the refreshments were spectacular and the programs fascinating.
Marjorie was one of the early members of OHEIB and is one of the founding members of the Toronto Home Economics Association. She attended the first informal gathering of Home Economists at the Toronto Women’s Press Club in October 1935, which officially became THEA in 1938.
In 1966 Marjorie received an Honourary Life Membership in THEA for her contribution to the association, and in 1986, THA established the Marjorie Thompson Flint Award for “someone who has made a distinct and substantial contribution to the association and has shown outstanding accomplishment in the profession of Home Economics”. If you didn’t know before, now you know why they named it for her.
Marjorie, the Ontario Home Economists in Business are enormously proud to welcome you to the OHEIB Hall of Fame.
(Marjorie Thompson Flint passed away on July 2, 1998, in Calgary.)