The Gerber baby’s long anonymity also ensured that there was at least one pretender to the throne. In the 1940s, a family sued the company, claiming that the child was the baby on the label. Mrs. Smith testified in court and revealed her model’s identity, and the lawsuit was decided in Gerber’s favor.
Ms Cook, aware of her role from early childhood, kept her counsel. After moving to Orlando, Florida with her family in the late 1930s, she earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, followed by a master’s in field from the University of South Florida. She taught English in middle and high school and became the department chair of Hillsborough High School in Tampa, Fla.
As a young teacher, Mrs. Cook, afraid of the exquisite kind of disdain in which adolescents excel, for never revealing her infantile identity. It was not until the end of the 1970s, with Gerber’s commemoration of the drawing’s 50th anniversary, that she made herself publicly known as a subject. Her students, she later said, were intrigued.
The husband of Mrs. Cook, James Cook, a criminologist who was a major at the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office in Tampa, died in 2004. Her survivors include three daughters, Jan Cook, Carol Legarreta and Kathy Cook; a son, Clifford; eight grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.
After she retired from teaching, Ms. Cook wrote a series of self-published crime novels. She became amiably reconciled with life as the Gerber baby, giving interviews and appearing on the TV quiz show “To Tell the Truth.”
Bogart was a minor, persistent annoyance, but he could bear it.
Ms Cook’s long-ago likeness remains a cultural touchstone to this day. In recent years, Gerber, now a subsidiary of Nestlé, has held an annual baby photo contest, awarding a $25,000 top prize and using the winner in its advertisements.
Once she identified herself as the Gerber baby — and as a mother of four — Ms. Cook left herself open to a question that she had to answer carefully. She gave just such an answer when The Globe and Mail, the Canadian newspaper, asked her the question in an interview in 1987:
Did she feed her own children Gerber baby food?
There was a short pause.
“Not exclusively,” replied Mrs. Cook.
