Remember the Breck girls? There was a time, a span of about 30 years, when you couldn't open a women's magazine without seeing a Breck girl. They advertised shampoo.
To several generations their pastel portraits came to symbolize clean-cut American femalehood. The Breck girls had healthy skin, white teeth. Their hair glowed - supernaturally.They had class. Park City resident Betty Keith was herself a Breck girl at age 17. She says, "It was the Grace Kelly look. I think that's what the manufacturers wanted."
John Breck started the company. He was a physician who specialized in scalp diseases. In 1908, he opened an office in Springfield, Mass., and, in an era when most people washed their hair with soap, he began dispensing a shampoo of his own making.
By 1928 Breck's shampoo was popular. A beauty supply dealer approached him about distributing it throughout New England. In 1936 Breck hired a local advertising agency to promote his products. Now he had three formulas; one each for normal, dry and oily hair.
In the beginning many of the Breck girls were actually that - girls with the last name of Breck.
The man Breck hired to draw up his ads, Charles Sheldon, was a pastels artist. Searching for someone to pose for the Breck ad, Sheldon chanced upon two women who worked in his office. John Breck liked those two portraits so much that he had Sheldon start doing portraits of the women in his family.
Breck's mother, sisters, daughters-in-law and grandchildren all posed, some of them several times. There were actually two Breck boys also; both were John Breck's grandsons.
Over time, Sheldon expanded his talent search and painted other women from the Springfield area. In all, he made 107 portraits. When Ralph William Williams took over as illustrator in 1960, he used brighter colors and professional models. Williams also produced more than 100 portraits, painting up until the late 1970s, when the Breck girl ads were discontinued.
When Dial Corp. bought the Breck company in 1990, the new owners inherited a warehouse containing 150 portraits. The original paintings were mostly unidentified and in disrepair. But they hit a chord with John Teets, chairman of Dial Corp.
He had six of them cleaned and restored. Then others saw their worth. "They just knocked your socks off," says Nancy Dedera, public relations manager. So Dial built a Breck Girl Hall of Fame in the Phoenix corporate offices and launched a nationwide search to find everyone who was ever a Breck girl.
In her Park City home, Betty Keith learned of the search on a television news show. Her portrait was in Harper's magazine in 1962.
Keith was one of the professional models. A granddaughter of Utah mining magnate David Keith, Keith spent her elementary school days in Salt Lake City. When she was in high school, however, she and her parents lived in New York.
Today, when it seems models have to unbutton their jeans in order to sell shampoo, Keith understands the nostalgia for Breck girls. It's a nostalgia for innocence.
"At the Eileen Ford agency, we weren't allowed to model lingerie or work for personal product companies, " she says. "Those were different times."