(3) James R Hagerty, Mary Elizabeth Hilton. 1937-2023. Champion of Cloth Diaper Fought P&G. Wall Street Journal, Mar 18, 2023, at page A12.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/mar ... dies-at-85-fdb5f0ed
Note:
(a) In print, the online paragraph 2 became: Cloth-diaper services "made some headway against disposables in the 1980s and early 1990s by arguing that throwaway diapers were clogging landfills and creating a heavy burden on the environment.
(b) Print keeps the next paragraph that start with "Makers of disposable diapers eventually retorted that * * * "
(c) The print then has the next and last paragraph that combines part of two online paragraphs: "Faced with uncertainty over environmental consequences, more parents defaulted to the convenience of disposables. By the early 2000s, few diaper laundries remained in operation. Ms Hilton sold her company and helped run a campground. In recent years, she had Parkinson’s disease. She died March 5 at the age of 85."
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Around the time that Procter & Gamble Co. was introducing Pampers in the early 1960s, Mary Hilton and her husband, William Hilton, had a different idea: They decided to go into the business of laundering cloth diapers.
For the next 40 years, Ms. Hilton fought a valiant rearguard action against P&G and other makers of disposable diapers. Based in Kalamazoo, Mich., her family-owned company at its peak in the mid-1990s had about 10,000 customers in three states and more than 150 employees. Ms. Hilton, who took charge of the company after her husband died in 1978, became one of the biggest operators in a mostly mom-and-pop business and a spokeswoman for diaper-cleaning trade groups.
Diaper laundries, which cleaned cloth diapers and delivered them back to homes, made some headway against disposables in the 1980s and early 1990s by arguing that throwaway diapers were clogging landfills and creating a heavy burden on the environment.
Makers of disposable diapers eventually retorted that cotton farming involved use of pesticides and that trucks delivering diapers added to air pollution. Faced with uncertainty over environmental consequences, more parents defaulted to the convenience of disposables.
By the early 2000s, few diaper laundries remained in operation. Ms. Hilton sold her company and helped run a campground. In recent years, she had Parkinson’s disease. She died March 5 at the age of 85.
Fighting P&G and its vast advertising budget was never going to be easy. In 1984, Ms. Hilton told the Chicago Tribune that her business relied mainly on word-of-mouth and referrals. “We see 50% of all babies born [in the company’s service areas] at one time or another,” she said.
For a spell, the environmental argument seemed to be going her way. “Cotton diapers are the original curbside recyclables,” John Shiffert, executive director of the National Association of Diaper Services, told the New York Times in 1990. The Wall Street Journal reported the same year that about 18 billion disposable diapers ended up in landfills annually.
Ms. Hilton described her customers as “the same gals who talked manufacturers into removing salt and food coloring from baby food.” Some of them turned to Ms. Hilton for advice when their babies were squalling. She was willing to counsel them, based on her experience as a mother of three, and produced a pamphlet called “The ABC’s of Diaper Rash.”
In the 1970s, she wrote a syndicated newspaper column for the Diaper Service Consumer Information Council. In one column, she offered suggestions for parents who found themselves out of diapers in the middle of the night: “A terry cloth hand towel makes a good diaper if your baby is small. For a somewhat larger child, fold one of Dad’s tee-shirts into a soft, fairly thick rectangle.”
In another column, she reported that mesh playpens could be mended with dental floss.
She was born Mary Elizabeth Sorgenfrei on Sept. 20, 1937, in Chicago. Her mother worked for an advertising agency. After a divorce when Mary was a child, her mother remarried an architect who ran a construction business. The oldest of three daughters, Mary was on a synchronized swimming team and spent summers at a family farm in Michigan.
She enrolled in the veterinary program at Michigan State University but found it unwelcoming to women and dropped out after a year. She met Mr. Hilton when she stepped into his cab. He was working part time as a taxi driver to support his studies. Mr. Hilton was unrelated to the hotel clan; his original name was William Heltebrake. Tired of spelling that name out for other people, he decided to change his last name and found Hilton in a phone book.
In the early 1960s, a construction company that employed Mr. Hilton went out of business. He and Ms. Hilton decided to try the diaper-laundering business partly because it didn’t require a large amount of capital to start. They initially laundered the diapers in their own basement. In 1967, her company advertised a price of 80 diapers delivered weekly for $3, or the current equivalent of about $27.
Ms. Hilton’s survivors include her companion, Rick Charles Johnson, along with three children, five grandchildren and a sister.
A nonprofit she founded in 1991, Clothes for Kids, worked with diaper services to supply clean clothing to homeless children. She also developed methods to rehabilitate wild animals, including raccoons, skunks and woodchucks. In the 1990s, she and her children acquired an animal sanctuary in Coloma, Mich., where she once helped with the birth of a camel.
As a business owner, she sometimes struggled to be taken seriously by men. At one point, a lawyer refused to return her calls. She sent him a box of freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies and promised another if he called her back. He did.
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发表于 3-18-2023 12:40:03
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