Here’s another excerpt from Fred Allen’s 1954 account of his time in radio, Treadmill to Oblivion, referenced below. He is describing his next venture after his first radio show, The Linit Bath Club Revue. I believe these events took place in 1932.
This led to our next radio venture, the Salad Bowl Revue, which was sponsored by the Hellman’s Mayonnaise Company. Mayonnaise is a seasonal product and every year the Hellmann people confined their radio campaign to the summer months when salads were popular. …apparently our conception of our own show met with the sponsor’s approval. When October 1 arrived, the date that the mayonnaise advertising was normally discontinued, the Hellmann Company announced that it was keeping the program on until January 1. Long after lettuce, endive, romaine and other leafy salad ingredients had disappeared that fall, our announcer carried on extolling the merits and the qualities of Hellmann’s Mayonnaise. I often wondered about the housewives who had no sales resistance that winter. What were they eating under their Hellmann’s Mayonnaise?
Mayo goes back a couple hundred years; Hellmann’s (known as Best Foods west of the Rockies) goes back to 1905.
I find this fascinating because it suggests that mayo was primarily used as a salad dressing back in the early Thirties and not on sandwiches as it is today. Second, it suggests you could only get lettuce in the summer, not year-round.