What Did You Want to Be When You Grew Up?

Children dressed up in Halloween costumes.

Betty Crocker. Halloween. Fashion Designer. What Did You Want to Be When You Grew Up?

My mother wanted me to be Betty Crocker when I grew up.

Not the General Mills’ Betty Crocker, but the equivalent for Amana, in Iowa, where we lived.

It was not just because my Mom’s name was Betty.

Career Choices

She had wanted to be a fashion designer when she grew up.

A career assessment tester told her she did not have enough creativity to be a fashion designer.

Realizing that her career was going to include breaks for children, and eventually finding that it also needed to be portable, as my Dad’s climb up the corporate ladder led us to many cities, she settled on being a secretary.

She, with a degree in Journalism from the University of Michigan.

She whose employer once offered my father a job in order to keep my mother.

She envisioned a professional career for me.

Betty Crocker History

Betty Crocker was co-created by Marjorie Child Husted, a graduate of the University of Minnesota.

Husted worked at a company that eventually merged into what became General Mills.

A home economist and businesswoman, Husted wrote and provided the voice for The Betty Crocker Cooking School of the Air radio show for twenty years, starting in 1924.

Seeing Into the Future

Computers, the field I eventually entered, were not even on the radar screen when I was growing up.

But, setting high sights for her children, my Mom set me on the path to expect to do anything I chose.

My granddaughter, who just made a contemporary shrug out of an old pair of pants, may just have inherited her great-grandmother’s interest in fashion design.

Mom would have been pleased.

What did you want to be when you were growing up?

What do your grandchildren want to be?

Do their Halloween costumes reflect their career ambitions?

Popular characters of the day?

Scary monsters they want to control?

Heroes?

To you, the children you were and the heroes you became.

Carol Covin, “Granny-Guru”

Author, “Who Gets to Name Grandma? The Wisdom of Mothers and Grandmothers”

http://newgrandmas.com