Welcome to Spock Talk! The podcast that explores:

• What’s the deal with Dr. Benjamin Spock?
• How did Baby and Child Care become the preeminent parenting guide of the 20th century?
• Who gets to tell parents how to parent?

I’m Deborah

And I’m Katie

We’re talking Spock because we want to understand what it is about Dr. Spock’s work that endures. Why is the Spock brand around, twenty-five years after Dr. Spock died?

Last episode we talked about Spock’s captivating personality and ability to change. 

In this episode we are going to talk about money. Spock-onomics, if you will, of the parent advice industry.

First, trivia: First editions of Baby and Child Care sell for $1650, $850, 750 online. So, if you have a copy, if you come across a copy, know that it’s valuable!

Spock personal finances

Let’s go over Spock’s personal financial situation. The saga of Baby and Child Care, like most American tales, was economically motivated from the very beginning because, like most Americans, Spock had to work for a living. And he completed a psychiatry residency at Paine Whitney way back in 1932 in order to distinguish himself from other New York City pediatric practices. And, eventually, the psychology stuff, the Freudian stuff, set him apart and helped to make Baby and Child Care different and, consequently, successful.

Young Jane and Ben Spock didn’t have a lot of money when Spock’s pediatric practice wasn’t bringing in a livable wage yet. In the 1930s Jane’s family kept the Spocks afloat. After the Cheney family fortune ran out, Jane’s sister, who was married to a wealthy man, regularly sent Jane money (Maier, p. 105).

But they weren’t poor. In the early 1930s, which was THE DEPRESSION, they had a sailboat, a refrigerator, and a part-time maid.

Sailboats, whether merited or not, just always seem like a fantastic signifier of wealth. I’m sure they’re not always any more expensive than any other boat, but the amount of leisure time it takes to learn all those knots! C’mon!

Spock was on a fairly conventional career path for a physician slash academicc. In 1946, when Baby and Child Care, was published, the Spocks moved to Rochester, MN, so that Spock could pursue an academic career at Mayo Clinic.

Spock didn’t earn an advance for the first edition. Or a lot of royalties, either. It was a surprise word-of-mouth hit. (Spock on Spock, p. 135)

Spock’s biographer Maier breaks down the bad deal: “From 1946 until 1953…he received a total of $37,000 in royalty payments for more than five million copies sold of his book in paperback…$23,000 from hardcover [sales]. If he had signed a contract with the standard royalty rate, he would have earned at least $200,000” (Maier, p. 181).

Spock tried to negotiate with Pocket Books for a higher royalty rate. They agreed to double the royalties, but only if Spock wrote two more books. (Spock on Spock, p. 139). The hitch was, the Mayo Clinic had really strict rules about publishing. Doctors on staff could only publish in medical journals. (Maier, p. 195).

I don’t want to insult anyone? But maybe we should mention the difference between popular and academic publishing?

That seems so snobby! I’m not steeped in the world of academic publishing, but it seems like today a science book that crosses over to the general public is something we celebrate, isn’t it? Scholarly sources are written by experts for experts, like research published in JAMA or Journal of Pediatrics, that you have to get from a medical library or a library database. They are obviously important and serve to disseminate and move research forward. Popular sources are written for the general public, the kinds of books you can buy at a Barnes and Noble or find at a public library or read on the internet. They can be trashy, but they can also introduce complex ideas to society as a whole.

Thank you, that’s a good overview. Spock couldn’t publish the type of books Pocket Books wanted, because those would have been popular sources, the kind sold at bookstores to the general population. He was offered a bunch of endorsement deals, but he turned them all down, because he was trying to pursue this legitimate and serious academic career path

Endorsements? Like a basketball player? Could Spock have had a nursing shoe with his silhouette on it?

Yes! Diapers, baby products, pharmaceuticals, even Heinz ketchup. (Maier, p. 179). 

I’m trying to decide whether a pediatrician endorsement would affect my ketchup choices. Maybe an ad campaign where a famous pediatrician reminds us that kids will eat healthy foods as long as they’re doused in ketchup? Though I guess ranch dressing might be a better fit there…

In 1951 The Spocks moved for a job at the University of Pittsburgh. And Pittsburgh is different, in that the institution didn’t have restrictions on where faculty could publish. Pittsburgh faculty could publish in popular media, like magazines, newspapers, books, even going on television (Maier, p. 195).

This is not a great time for the Spocks’ personal lives. 1954 is the year that Jane Spock was hospitalized, diagnosed with schizophrenia. And treatment was very expensive. “Her bills for therapy and doctor visits virtually equaled his annual royalty payments” (Maier, p. 181).

Even though Spock made a nice salary, his University of Pittsburgh income couldn’t keep pace with the enormous bill for Jane’s treatment. So he started a company called Spock Projects and he got a very lucrative deal to write a column for Ladies Home Journal magazine.

Ah,the good old days when print magazines weren’t floundering.

I feel like we keep saying that! I really do feel nostalgia for magazines. Spock finally finished the two books Pocket Books had wanted, contingent on the better royalties for Baby and Child Care. One was a picture book titled A Baby’s First Year and another book titled Feeding Your Baby and Child.

He even started a TV show! He hosted a half-hour program on the Pittsburgh educational station. And NBC picked it up and in 1955 the show, called Doctor Spock, aired nationwide on Sunday afternoons.

Please tell me that he wasn’t just hawking diet drugs and snake oil like today’s TV doctors.

There is a good list of descriptions of the content that I received from the Library of Congress for 27 episodes, and 12 entries of outtakes. The descriptions available most often include a trio of mothers on the show to discuss topics like toilet training, teething, how to prepare for a second child, how to prevent Christmas hysteria.

 Oh I love this! It’s like a panel show with Spock as the moderator.

There was an episode with three grandmothers, an episode with hetero parent couples, an episode with four fathers, and an episode where he visited a class for expectant fathers.

I expected this to be really gender slanted, like portraying mothers as helpless and men as experts. But, according to the LOC descriptions, the gender distribution of experts was actually better than that. He had a lady teacher, a lady medical doctor, a lady school administrator, plus two episodes with male medical doctors. Not too bad for an admitted sexist!

Let’s listen to the theme song for the show:

Thank you to the WNET Group and the American Archive of Public Broadcasting!

There are a scant handful of digitized recordings of this gem of a show. I watched one, so far, titled “Fathers and Children” with Dr. Spock and four white guys sitting at a table together having a rather freewheeling discussion about discipline, corporal punishment, working parents, stay-at-home parents, the isolation and overwhelm of stay-at-home parents, paternal involvement, weekend leisure time, balancing work and community service and family time. 

Setting aside the dated nature of the conversation, I have to say that Dr. Spock is a very good moderator. He guides the conversation, makes sure everyone gets a turn, asks open ended questions, does the “when you say, I hear” kind of therapy technique of clarifying an answer. He’s a very natural television personality.

As a physician, Spock’s strengths were patient care and bedside manner. And, as an academic, his strength was teaching. He made his lectures very engaging, sometimes by acting out, like a toddler temper tantrum in front of a med school class.

I imagine Spock’s impression of a toddler closely mirrors his actual reaction upon returning home from an engagement to find he had a mustard stain on his tie all afternoon.

We’ve talked about how Spock was a great writer, sort of the ur-pop psychology author.

But he wasn’t a very successful academic. He had all of these ideas about child rearing, but never backed them up with hard data, or published any meaningful scholarly work. At Mayo Clinic, he worked on a long-term study called the Inborn Temperament Study, but the results were inconclusive and never published. At the University of Pittsburgh, Spock was an ineffective administrator and was asked to leave administration and just teach. (Maier, p. 197-198). So, instead, he resigned. And he got a different job and moved to Cleveland to work at Western Reserve University.

At Western Reserve, Spock worked on a Child Rearing Study. It made some immeasurable observations on behavior, but it didn’t result in any facts.  “[His colleagues…suggested he wasn’t a very serious academic researcher, that his impressionistic Freudianism doomed the Child Rearing Study to failure as a work of science” (Maier, p. 259). He was also unpopular because of his political activism. And he retired early, in 1967 (Maier, p. 1967)

Retiring early was okay because of the Spock Projects income. In the mid-1960s Spock earned annual royalties of around $30,000. Plus he wrote for magazines, too. In the mid-1980s, Spock earned around $150,000 a year from writing for magazines(Maier). He said, quote: “I can get up to four thousand dollars for even a warmed-over article on baby care” (Massie, 84) Spock is comparing it to how no one wants his political opinions, but what an attitude!

I mean, work smarter not harder, I guess.

Spock claimed that before his indictment in 1968, he could earn between $150 and $200 per speech. After his indictment, when he was a more infamous figure, he could earn between $1500-$2000. (Maier, p. 317-318).

 I can’t think of a single other example in which an indictment has increased someone’s popularity. Not a single one.

Spock’s book sales dipped after the indictment. At that point in time, Baby and Child Care included ads and all of the revenue went to the publisher. Spock filed a lawsuit to both stop the ads from running and to improve his royalties, and reached a settlement (Maier, p. 317-318).

So, it appeared to everyone who put any time thinking about Spock’s personal finances, that he was doing fine. Better than average.

Until the late 1990s when Mary Morgan, Spock’s second wife, issued an appeal to friends of the Spocks to raise money for home health care (nytimes 1998 article)

This did not go over well. There were several news articles about this. According to one article, the Spocks lived on approximately $100K a year, so not ultra wealthy but not poor, either? They had second homes (plural!) and boats and a New York City apartment. 

 This is obviously a sad state of affairs, and no one deserves to be reduced to poverty in their old age, but maybe fewer sailing trips to the Virgin Islands?

Mary Morgan was 54 at the time, and I wonder if she was trying to protect her inheritance? So, basically this appeal is like an analog GoFundMe to keep Spock out of nursing home care. Which I get, nursing homes are sad, smelly places!

Journalists who wrote about this were offended that the Spocks personal finances were being “drained by bills for 24-hour nursing.” The home health care was bad enough, but they also criticized the Spocks’ macrobiotic chef, yoga therapy, twice weekly psychoanalysis, and shiatsu massage” (Carvajal, 1998). I read a couple of judge-y articles that called these “new age luxuries”. And called Spock a millionaire, but I’m not sure he was! (Eagan / boston herald)

Pre-GOOP Look how far new age luxury has come in 25 years! Now we have Gwenyth Paltrow hawking 2000 dollar bedazzled Ouija boards and 100 thousand dollar concrete self heating bathtubs. We can clone our dogs and don’t get me started on the modern importance of crystals.

After Death

After Spock died in 1998, two entrepreneurs, Douglas Lee and John Buckley, learned that Mary Morgan was taking offers for the intellectual property rights to Spock’s work. So Buckley and Lee raised 14 million dollars and bought the rights to Baby and Child Care and the rest of Spock’s articles, essays, and books, starting the “Dr. Spock Co. based in Menlo Park, California” which employed 25 people (Mochari, p. 40).

They got a three-book deal with Simon and Schuster. I’m pretty certain that it was one of these books that I got for my baby shower in 2009 that inspired our whole Spock Talk project.

These 25 Dr. Spock Co. employees launched the Drspock.com website and worked on syndicating content with companies like Discovery Channel and…I quote, “America Online.”

America Online? On the World Wide Web? How futuristic!

For context, (and for my style guide nerds), this was when the word Web site was a two word phrase, with a capital W.

When did we officially stop having to capitalize Internet? I still sometimes do it out of habit.

I care completely! Next podcast pitch: a weekly conversation about punctuation.

Douglas Lee had a plan to “offer custom-marketing packages for consumer products, whereby the company would create small bits of advice for, say orange-juice cartons or cereal boxes for a fee” (Mochari, p. 42). This makes me sad, considering how Spock could have made a bunch of money from endorsements when he was alive! And he rejected those offers out of principle, and pursuit of his academic career!

But this is fun to read as a 2023 person, in a that’s a terrible idea! way: “Lee [saw] big revenue potential in selling subscriptions for Dr. Spock content to Health maintenance organizations and Fortune 500 human resources departments for use on their websites and in their newsletters” (Mochari, p. 42).

 Do you think Spock would’ve beaten Karp to the SNOO?

There are all these press releases from the early 2000s about the Dr. Spock Company appointing people to its Board of Directors. They call themselves “the leading parenting media company”. But I’d like to point out that you can call yourself anything, like I called our other podcast, “the acclaimed podcast It’s My Screen Time Too” in the teaser for Spock Talk because our moms like it. 

 listeners, if you know any moms who’d like our podcasts, tell them about it! The support of moms has given us so much! Self esteem! High waisted jeans (thanks moms)! That Kelly Clarkson song “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”!

Information about private businesses is notoriously opaque. But,It appears that they were unable to successfully monetize the Spock content to the original 14 million dollar investment. In a 2004 article in Crain’s Chicago Business, a firm called Northcoast Capital Management closed down one of their funds and their “biggest and most problematic fund II investment is an $8-million stake in the Dr. Spock Company whose main asset is trademark rights associated with the late baby doctor” (Strahler, p. 4)

Venture capital seems to kill a lot of really good and cool businesses, am I right?

[I am older than you, so maybe you don’t remember the promise of the dot com era for young people! And then the pets.com epic crashes revealed it was all a house of cards]

 It also seems like maybe the venture capital funded entrepreneurs didn’t try that hard?? The US Patent and Trademark Office database, I searched it. The Dr. Spock Company filed many, many in the early 2000s and then all of the trademarks were dead within a few years, or at least in the same decade. They never renewed them. There’s not a lot of information about the Dr. Spock Company going bust, but companies don’t issue optimistic press releases when their earnings don’t meet expectations.

In the Maier biography, he wrote that “Some [social theorists, historians] (whom he does not name) see “Spock’s book [as] a metaphor for the entire baby-boom generation” (Maier, p. 410). And this is fantastic. Because to have it end in a crass money grab is so fitting.

I should think it’s always hard for a company to flourish after the death of its visionary founder. I don’t know whether you remember this little outfit called Apple. What have they been up to? And Walt Disney Pictures hasn’t been up to much since Walt’s passing.

I’ve got a little bit more about Spock’s legacy in the dot com era: In 2010, Mary Morgan sued The Dr. Spock Co, owner of Drspock.com website, for $84,000 for breaching their royalty agreement. She was supposed to be paid $8000 monthly “for the right to use Spock's name and likeness online.” (Dinzeo) The Dr Spock Co responded, noting that it had an unspecified oral agreement with Ms. Morgan that rendered her notice and termination a nullity (Dinzeo)

Mary Morgan, a year earlier in 2009, had claimed that Dr. Spock Co operated “the largest pediatric website in the world” which, 1. How is that measured? And 2. That can’t possibly be true. It’s an anemic, janky looking, mostly abandoned website! There is a blog on there that was updated once in 2021, a few times in 2020. One of the posts is just an embedded YouTube video of the Rich Roll podcast? Totally weird. There is a poetry section! It’s an unprofessional web presence and I don’t believe it’s a successful company now, or that it ever really was.

Which brings us back to our basic question: what does this have to do with Spock’s work enduring?

IF Morgan hadn’t sold the intellectual property, and if a venture capital entrepreneur extractive capitalism type hadn’t swept in and repackaged and marketed Spock’s work into a baby guide empire, would Spock’s work endure?

Clearly the entrepreneurs Lee and Buckley didn’t turn their initial investment into a bigger fortune. But, their pursuit of profit kept the Spock name and legacy alive by putting it online. Without the venture capitalists, I don’t think a Dr. Spock website would exist, and the books that were published after he passed away in 1998 may not have been published.

And he’s still in the zeitgeist, Which brings us to us! Here we are, glomming on to the long tail of the Spock legacy. 

New Spock / Old Spock segment

Before we wrap up, let’s go to a segment we call “New Spock, Old Spock.” In this segment we’ll take a look at early Spock advice and see what has changed since the mid-1900s.

Since I’m a mom of twins, I’m always particularly drawn to twin advice. Back when Baby and Child Care was in its earlier editions, twins were much less common than they are now. So I read this section from the 1957 edition of Baby and Child Care, with bemused interest: 

“Any mother of twins simply has to find short cuts in housework. She can go through her house, room by room, stripping it of unessential furnishing and furniture that prolong housecleaning. Furthermore, she should clean only half as often as before. She can select clothes for the family that don’t muss and soil quickly, that launder easily, and that, as far as possible, don’t need ironing. She can select foods that require the minimum of preparation and attention, let dishes soak clean in suds, let them drain dry” (P. 560)

Katie, does the 10th edition include information on preparing for twins? Or any tips for finding shortcuts in housework?

There is almost no mention of twins in the 10th edition! They’re only mentioned in passing in the section on sibling rivalry, giving parents hope, claiming “Parents of twins, who are often desperate for assistance in caregiving, are frequently amazed to find how much help the received from a child as young as three years with tasks like fetching a bath towel, a diaper, or a bottle from the refrigerator.” Does this check out?

Thanks for listening to this episode of Spock Talk! Please subscribe so you are sure to get our next episode, in which we’ll wrap up our exploration of Dr. Benjamin Spock and his role in the history of parenting advice.

See this episode’s show notes for our references.

If you like what you’re hearing, give us a like or a share on social media! Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts! Listen to our other podcast, It’s My Screen Time Too where we review TV shows and movies made for kids.

We’ll see you soon, the next time we Talk Spock!