Today in 1944, the birthday of Diana Ross.
Our show isn’t long enough to cover all of the hit records she’s had, as a solo artist, on duets and with The Supremes.
But we do have time to talk about how at one point that group was so popular, they even got their own line of bread!
The Supremes started in Detroit, forming out of an earlier group known as the Primettes.
In 1960, they started recording with a startup label known as Motown Records; by 1964 they were one of the biggest musical acts in the world, right up there with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.
They had twelve number one singles in all, five of them in a row at one point.
The head of Motown Records, Berry Gordy, had always wanted acts like The Supremes to represent, as he put it, “The Sound of Young America.”
He had long taken care to present Motown artists so that Black musicians would find fans among the mainstream pop audience of the 1960s, which was predominantly white.
And in the case of The Supremes, he also got them promotional deals with some big name products.
At one point they sang jingles for Coca-Cola, and did public service announcements with the Ad Council.
The Supremes did a TV ad for Arrid Extra Dry deodorant; after all, you need to stay dry when you “step into 15,000 watts of light, wearing $6,000 worth of silk and sequins.”
But maybe even bigger than TV and radio was The Supremes Special Formula White Bread, produced by Schafer Bakeries of Lansing, Michigan and featuring the trio’s faces on the wrappers.
You can’t get more mainstream than appearing on somebody’s breakfast table, after all.
This particular promotion was short-lived, and there’s a good chance that’s what it was supposed to be, sort of like how a famous athlete might be on a box of Wheaties for a few weeks or months.
Unlike the Supremes’ line of bread, though, the music remains timeless.
Today in 1879, a newspaper article about an experiment in Belgium.
Those involved took a group of cats several miles away from their homes and attached messages to each cat… to see whether they might be trained to deliver mail.
The cats made it home, but come on, cats delivering mail?!?
Loafing Around – The Supremes White Bread (Voices of East Anglia via Archive.org)
Mail-Delivering Cats (Weird Universe)
