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Ann Turner Cook Dies at 95;
Her Face Sold Baby Food by the Billions





Her likeness as an infant has graced the labels on Gerber products
for more than 90 years, though for decades her identity was not disclosed.



Ann Turner Cook in 2004, with a copy of a charcoal drawing
of her as an infant used on Gerber baby food products.
Credit...Chris O'Meara/Associated Press


June 4, 2022


For years, the suspects were legion:

Humphrey Bogart. Shirley Temple. Elizabeth Taylor.
Brooke Shields. Bob Dole. Richard M. Nixon.

Any one of them, or so the urban legends ran, might have been the model for the
most ubiquitous baby picture in the world: the charcoal sketch of the winsome infant
that for more than 90 years has graced the label of every Gerber product, from infant
formula to baby food to bottled juice.

But the one name no one thought to mention — because for half a century no one
knew it — was that of Ann Turner Cook, a retired schoolteacher who died early Friday
at her home in St. Petersburg, Fla., her family confirmed on Saturday.

She was 95.

Ms. Cook was the bona fide Gerber baby, the winner of a nationwide contest in 1928 that
has since seen her portrait reproduced on billions of jars of baby food and other items
sold round the world.

In 1990, The New York Times described the sketch, by the artist Dorothy Hope Smith, as
being “among the world’s most recognizable corporate logos.”

As a baby, Ms. Cook was in very much the right place at the right time. As an adult, however,
fearing ridicule for her long-running role as a princess of puréed peas, she did not disclose
her identity for decades.

Ms. Cook, who received no royalties for the use of her image, profited from it by precisely
$5,000 over some 90 years. That sum — a settlement she accepted from Gerber in 1951 — let
her make the down payment on her first home.

The daughter of Leslie and Bethel (Burson) Turner, Ann Leslie Turner was born in
Bridgeport, Conn., on Nov. 20, 1926, and spent her early childhood in nearby Westport, Conn.
Westport in those years was something of an artists’ colony: Ann’s father was a well-known
illustrator who drew the syndicated comic strips “Wash Tubbs” and “Captain Easy,
Soldier of Fortune.”

Dorothy Hope Smith, a commercial illustrator who specialized in babies and children, was
a neighbor. (Ms. Smith, who died in 1955, also colored scores of New Yorker covers drawn
by her husband, the artist Perry Barlow, who was partly colorblind.)

In 1928, Gerber, a Michigan canning company that had introduced a line of baby foods that
year, put out the call for a portrait of a baby to be used in its advertising campaigns.

Ann was about 2 by then, but Ms. Smith submitted a simple sketch she had made in early 1927,
when Ann was 4 or 5 months old. She considered the sketch unfinished and told Gerber that
she would embellish it properly if she won.

Ms. Smith’s sketch was competing against lavish paintings done in oils, but Gerber’s judges
were captivated by its innocent immediacy: The dewy-eyed Ann gazes straight at the viewer,
her lips pursed as if in wonder.

Insisting the sketch not be altered, the judges declared it the winner. Gerber trademarked the
image in the early 1930s.

“I have to credit Dorothy with everything,” Ms. Cook told The St. Petersburg Times in 1992.
“I was really no cuter than any other baby, but she had wonderful artistic talent and was able
to draw a very appealing likeness.”

For decades, Gerber chose not to identify its flagship baby, or even to disclose its sex: The very
universality of the sketch — in it, any mother could glimpse her own child — was a marketing boon.

As a result, rumors flew. The one fingering Bogart, who was in his late 20s when Ms. Smith made
her drawing, was so persistent that for years Gerber kept a Bogart-denying form letter on hand
to send to inquisitors.

(Those inquisitors were at least partly right: Bogart’s mother, Maud Humphrey, was a renowned
commercial illustrator who used little Humphrey as a model for much of her work, which included
ads for Mellin’s Infant’s Foods, a turn-of-the-20th-century brand.)

The long anonymity of the Gerber baby also ensured that there was at least one pretender to the
throne. In the 1940s, one family sued the company, claiming that its child was the baby on the label.
Testifying in court, Ms. Smith disclosed her model’s identity, and the suit was decided in Gerber’s favor.

Ms. Cook, who had been aware of her role since early childhood, kept her own counsel. After moving
with her family to Orlando, Fla., in the late 1930s, she earned a bachelor’s degree in English from
Southern Methodist University in Dallas, followed by a master’s in the field from the University of
South Florida. She taught junior high and high school English, becoming the department chairwoman
of Hillsborough High School in Tampa, Fla.

As a young teacher, Ms. Cook, fearful of the exquisite brand of disdain at which adolescents excel,
chose never to disclose her infantile identity. Only in the late 1970s, with Gerber’s commemoration
of the drawing’s 50th anniversary, did she publicly reveal herself as its subject. Her students,
she later said, were intrigued.

Ms. Cook’s husband, James Cook, a criminologist who was a major with the Hillsborough County
Sheriff’s Office in Tampa, died in 2004. Her survivors include three daughters, Jan Cook, Carol Legarreta
and Kathy Cook; a son, Clifford; eight grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.

After retiring from teaching, Ms. Cook wrote a series of self-published crime novels. She grew
amiably reconciled to life as the Gerber baby, granting interviews and appearing on the television
quiz show “To Tell the Truth.”

Bogart was a small lingering irritant, but he could be borne.

Ms. Cook’s long-ago likeness remains a cultural touchstone to this day. In recent years, Gerber,
now a subsidiary of Nestlé, has held an annual babies’ photo contest, awarding a grand prize of
$25,000 and using the winner in its advertising.

Once she identified herself as the Gerber baby — and as the mother of four to boot — Ms. Cook
left herself open to a question that she had to answer cagily. She gave just such an answer when
The Globe and Mail, the Canadian newspaper, put the question to her in a 1987 interview:

Did she feed her own children Gerber baby food?

There was a slight pause.

“Not exclusively,” Ms. Cook replied.




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Original 'Gerber baby,' Ann Turner Cook, dies at 95