It’s seldom that an amateur who turns to the professional ranks succeeds on the first attempt—unless the amateur is as gifted as Mary Lee Taylor.
In 1933 a young St. Louis housewife named Mrs. Susan Cost, noted for her original recipes, started broadcasting her own tempting table treats. Other housewives who followed her recipes acclaimed her instant success and the Mary Lee Taylor show has been on the air ever since.
But Mary Lee Taylor’s work does not stop with her recipes for better meals. Equally important is her “recipe for happiness,” designed to aid young couples in understanding the problems of married life. Based on her own experiences of a happy marriage, which, nonetheless, had its problems, she tries to aid married young people to face the trials which arise in every marriage.
A dramatization each week of the lives of a young, typical American married couple, Jim and Sally Carter, helps to illustrate her philosophy and make her advice more real to the young people who need it.
Off the air, as Mrs. Susan Cost, she is a patron of the St. Louis Symphony and of the Little Theater in that city – a group which offers help to aspiring actors. Her main hobby, aside from her recipes, is collecting tea cups. She already has several hundred cups, many of them museum pieces.
(Originally published in Radio Television Mirror, June 1951).