Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, August 25, 1993 TAG: 9309240352
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WIRTZ LENGTH: Medium
Linda Fisher has aged 42 years since that day in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., when her mother entered her in a look-alike contest for Little Miss Sunbeam, the face that ascended to white-bread fame.
But the face is still pure Sunbeam. Add a few banana curls and a Peter Pan dress, and that immortal face is alive and well, and living in a Franklin County trailer court.
" `I was the Sunbeam Bread girl.' It's a good line if you want to meet a man," Fisher, now 48, says, joking.
Her grandchildren take her to Show and Tell at school - along with a loaf of the bread, to compare.
A Roanoke woman once brought an official Little Miss Sunbeam doll to Fisher for her to autograph. Promotional give-aways, the dolls were "about this tall, and they looked exactly like me," Fisher recalls. "They sent me one, but I gave it to my daughter a long time ago."
Fisher recalls the photo sessions from a 6-year-old's perspective: pure torture. She had to sit there under the lights for what seemed like hours, her right hand holding up her left arm, the fingers on her left hand holding a piece of bread in her mouth.
"I remember the photographer kept trying to get her to smile," recalls Fisher's mother, Mae Hunter of Sink Grove, W.Va. "But she kept saying she couldn't smile and bite her bread at the same time."
Someone cut her bangs, which made her mad. "And they made me eat so much bread, I thought I was gonna go bananas," Fisher recalls.
Indeed, photos from the 1951 photo shoot show Fisher was a dead ringer for Little Miss Sunbeam, who was created in 1942 by New York City artist Ellen Segner, the first woman to design a consumer package. According to Quality Bakers of America, the company that owns the rights to the Sunbeam name, the logo is the most widely distributed baked foods trademark in the world.
Fisher was one of several Little Miss Sunbeams chosen from local contests held throughout the South in the early 1950s. Michelle Farrell, a company spokeswoman, said she receives calls every three months or so from women claiming to be the original model for the logo, when actually they were local look-alike contest winners.
"They were so young at the time they don't really remember that much from it - except being Little Miss Sunbeam," Farrell said. Such was the case with Fisher, whose 15 minutes of fame netted her a $100 savings bond and a lifetime of Sunbeam nostalgia.
"A hundred dollars was a lot of money back then," says Fisher, who cashed the bond in at age 15 to buy maternity clothes. (She'd dropped out of school at 14 to get married.)
Fisher spent much of the next 30 years of her marriage raising children and writing to celebrities. She'd send them signed photos of herself as Little Miss Sunbeam, and they'd send their own autographed photos back. She keeps them all in a scrapbook, which features Conway Twitty, Loretta Lynn, Barbara Mandrell, Oprah Winfrey and Skip Stevenson, former "Real People" host.
"I've met a lotta stars through [being] Little Miss Sunbeam," Fisher, now divorced, says. "Conway Twitty, I met him at Lakeside in Salem 15 years ago. I liked to have died here recently when he died."
Divorced now for four years, Fisher works in the laundry room of Roanoke's Sleep-Inn motel. She met her boyfriend in Bedford at a church gospel sing: "You just tell people that Little Miss Sunbeam is happier than she's ever been in her life, thanks to him."
Most people don't automatically recognize her as a Sunbeam bread girl double. "But all you have to do is ask people if they've ever bought a loaf of Sunbeam bread," and they usually make the connection, she adds.
Friends have brought back snapshots of various Sunbeam billboards from across the country for her. Other friends have displayed framed copies of the original black-and-white photo of Fisher posed to match the logo.
"I think they should update" the retro-style logo, Fisher says. "When my daughters were little, I thought they'd have made good ones."
Although Fisher usually buys light bread, she does occasionally indulge in her old Sunbeam standby. Her favorite Sunbeam sandwich is bologna with mayonnaise.
"It is good bread," she says.
"But then again, so is Rainbo."
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by CNB