Mrs. Olson Saves #ThrowbackThursday

Well then, she must be a miracle worker!

Welcome to Throwback Thursday, the almost-weekend picker upper!

I managed to let the week get away from me, but with a few writing projects on the table, and well, work, I can be excused…right?

But there is one thing that no one can be excused from…perfect coffee making!

There was a time where coffee commercials berated suburban housewives who made terrible missteps in coffee making ability.  But there was one woman who could swoop in from lord knows where, and save the day with the solution – Folgers!

Screenshot (239)

Her name is Mrs. Olson, and she is seemingly omnipotent and omniscient, when it is coffee that matters most!

And the only coffee that matters to her is Folgers, because…

Screenshot (241).png

Who is Mrs. Olson?  We have no clue, other than that she is a coffee expert who gets suburban wives out of trouble with their husbands for something so unimportant.

I’ll probably get beaten up by coffee lovers for that statement.

Mrs. Olson wasn’t some one-off character, she helped many a harried housewife out with her knowledge of perfect coffee. And by clicking play, you can bravely witness all the times she managed to do so!

The “Mrs. Olson” ads were a longtime staple of Folgers advertising, running from 1965 to 1985, and featuring Virginia Christine as the Swedish Coffee Goddess.  There’s no other way to describe her, although she is actually a neighbor to all of these women.  Must be a huge neighborhood full of harried housewives with bad coffee skills.  Turns out she is actually an American actress, and that she died in 1996.

Now I’m sad.

I’m also sad about the tone of these commercials.  I’m convinced this is the one time the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia don’t work.  That’s a whole other topic of discussion, but we’ll stray away from that.  Throwback Thursday is supposed to be pleasant, not a soapbox.

Happy again.

Well, that about does it for the suburban housewives, and the Swedish Coffee Goddess saving their days.  Throwback Thursday will give way (as it always does) to Flashback Friday tomorrow.

There will be more coffee involved.

3 comments

  1. oh wow! I grew up with Mrs Olson selling coffee.

    “Mountain grown”

    “It’s the richest kind.”

    yeh, Mrs Olson was that Swedish neighbor lady that you wish you had.

    Liked by 1 person

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s