And So It Began

Much to her surprise, Good Housekeeping (GH) magazine hired her in November 1944. She was to prepare lunch for the editor and his guests, and “they would teach me the magazine business,” which they did. “Now, the guests were very interesting,” she said, and began naming some. President Herbert Hoover. The Duke of Windsor. The president of Mexico and his bodyguard. The head of the state of Israel. Helen Hayes. Paul Whiteman, Margaret Truman. Fred Waring. “Lunch had to be different every day,” and only GH recipes were used.

Another part of her job was being responsible for food photography. “I introduced the food show,” she said. The staff would make dishes that were being considered for publication in the magazine and then style them with props on hand. Various department heads—of food, art, styling, and photography—would choose the most photogenic dish, and the winner would spend the day in the photo studio doing final preparations for publication of that dish.

She became the “hostess editor,” a position that, she said, “they made up just for me! There wasn’t anyone before or afterward.” She did all the corporate entertaining as well, along with Christmas parties, the luncheons, and “tray luncheons,” which were delivered to editors of the various Hearst magazines in the Hearst building where she worked.

The job was clearly exhilarating. She also managed to get a master’s degree in food at New York University in 1963. She was always on the go. No one in her family minded then. “My sons, my husband, my mother, nor my father never said, why are you working and why do you do so much,” she said. “You’d think somewhere along the line they’d have protested, but they didn’t.”

She stayed at GH until 1967, when she moved to Parents magazine as food editor. The company was also a book publisher, and one of its titles was The First Ladies Cook Book, recipes by the presidents’ wives going back to George Washington. Brock prepared the section on both Nixon and Humphrey; the updated edition was published the day after the election, with just the Nixons’ recipes.

In 1970, she moved to the New York Daily News as food reporter, responsible for the Sunday magazine section. “When food became number one, outplacing fashion in public interest, we went to the big Wednesday food section,” she said. “Instead of two pages, it went to 15 pages.” That was when computers replaced typewriters, which was handy for Brock because “I couldn’t type and I couldn’t spell.” She started doing interviews and watching New York’s “food people and places” more closely.

“At Good Housekeeping, there wasn’t much writing. I just wrote introductions to recipes. At Parents again, just introductions and maybe a blurb for each recipe,” she said. The Daily News had a test kitchen, and she developed a recipe for food photographs every week. She also styled the dish with props. And she was writing pages of articles.