Baby Girl Watson
At 10:26 on the evening of December 21, 1952, a baby girl was born at the Concord Hospital Memorial Unit in Concord, New Hampshire. She weighed eight pounds, seven ounces and measured nineteen and one-half inches long. Dr. Lake attended the birth, and Room 22 became the setting for the beginning of my life. On this small card, my first recorded identity was simply “Baby Girl Watson”.
The card was probably placed on or near my hospital bassinet so that the nursery staff could identify me. Its handwritten information records the essential facts of my arrival, but the printed design reveals something about the period in which I was born. In the lower corner is a can of PET Evaporated Milk, and across the bottom are the words “Compliments of The Pet Milk Company.”
PET Milk had been produced in the United States since 1885 and became one of the country’s best-known brands of evaporated milk. Because it was sterilized and sealed in a can, it could be stored safely without refrigeration until opened. Evaporated milk was widely used in preparing homemade infant formulas, particularly from the 1930s through the 1950s. PET Milk sales reached their height in 1950, just two years before my birth, as the postwar baby boom created an enormous market for products associated with babies and young families.
The company’s name on a hospital birth card was not accidental. By supplying useful materials to maternity wards, PET placed its product directly before new mothers, nurses, and physicians. The card does not establish whether I was ever fed PET Milk, but it demonstrates how closely infant-feeding companies had become connected with hospitals and newborn care by the early 1950s.
My family preserved this modest piece of cardboard for more than seventy years. What began as a practical hospital identification card is now the first surviving record of my life. It remembers the evening when, before I was given my own name, I entered the world as “Baby Girl Watson”.
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