“The fame of the Maryland apple is perhaps less known at home than in distant markets. The Maryland apple has never figured to any great extent in the lobster palaces in the Broadway section in New York at $1 per apple. It is a good apple, nevertheless.” – The Baltimore Sun, 1911
A Baltimore fruit merchant, U. Grant Border, posed a fascinating question in 1913: “Can King Apple be so advertised as to increase the consumption from year to year sufficiently to provide a profitable market for the great and steadily-increasing crops?” He believed that the answer was yes, and started a plan to form a sort of fund for apple-farmers to pool their money for national advertising campaigns.
“An apple a day keeps the doctor away” had been an old Welsh adage for a few decades by that time. Originally it has the somewhat more spiteful wording “eat an apple on going to bed, and you’ll keep the doctor from earning his bread.”
Grant, now a bona-fide “ad man,” continued to tout the health benefits of the apple, but he took it a step beyond. In 1912 he was quoted in many newspapers declaring that women should eat apples “morning, noon and night” to make their complexions more beautiful.
Tonoloway Mountain apple orchard, 1948 by A. Aubrey Bodine
His organization, the International Apple Shippers Association, declared October 31st “Apple Day.” When that wasn’t good enough, they dedicated an entire Apple Week. The Baltimore Fruit Producers’ Association held an event where they gave away 1000 apples. In two of the apples was a $5 gold piece. (That’s about $75 nowadays.)
Meanwhile, across the country, Lucy Gertrude MacKay was also making a career of apples. She had been conducting demonstrations on “apple cookery” since the early 1900s.