Ann Turner Cook, perhaps best known through out the world as the original Gerber baby died recently. Gerber announced Cook's death in an Instagram post on Friday, June 3. She was 95 years old.
In 1927, when Cook was five months old when an artist neighbor, Dorothy Hope Smith, drew a sketch that was later submitted for a contest Gerber was holding for a national marketing campaign for baby food. The image was so well received that it became the company's trademark in 1931.
Cook's identity as the Gerber baby had been held a secret until the 1970s. Despite speculation on who the baby on the packaging could be, the real Gerber baby was, in reality, an English teacher in Tampa, Fla., who later became a mystery novelist.
