Minty Cool
By Stefene Russell
Photograph courtesy of the Missouri History Museum Photographs and Prints Collection
On gummy, languorous summer days, folks evacuated their brick four-family flats for the St. Louis Theatre, which advertised not the cinematic quality of the films but a lobby “cooled by refrigeration.” As you can see from the ladies’ unwilted hair, though, heat didn’t draw them to the theater on this day, and neither did Inside the Lines, a lousy spy thriller. No, the surefire marquee draw was Baby Rose Marie, a little girl who sported silver dancing shoes and a Louise Brooks haircut and sang the blues so convincingly that she was accused of being an adult. RKO Radio toured her around the States with the Ipana Troubadours, a jazz band whose members dressed in toreador outfits and called themselves the Sam Lanin Orchestra on days when they were not brought to you by dandy, minty-fresh Ipana toothpaste. Though she kept the “Baby” moniker into her teens, Rose Marie Mazetta is best known as the saucy Sally Rogers from The Dick Van Dyke Show—and as that older dame in the top-middle Hollywood square, the one with the unfiltered-menthol voice and an innuendo for every occasion.
