Get free food at OTR diner for Bounty's birthday

Procter & Gamble is taking over an Over-the-Rhine diner Tuesday, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Bounty paper towels by paying tribute to one of its most successful advertising campaigns.

Bounty, which P&G first sold to consumers 1965, will transform Joe's Diner at 1203 Sycamore St. to Bounty's Diner and serve free diner meals, such as apple pie, cheeseburgers and BLTs, from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Bounty brand director Matt Barresi and Bounty spokesperson Victoria Schooler said they were looking for somewhere locally for the celebration. They came back to the diner theme, which harkens back to Bounty's earliest commercials featuring Rosie of Rosie's diner.

"That is one of the more famous advertising campaigns in the history of advertising," Barresi said.

Barresi said diners were messy, greasy and had lots of people eating in them. The messes needed to be cleaned up quickly so waitresses could serve the next customers. "It was almost a torture test place that everybody could relate to," Barresi said.

Barresi said he grew up with Rosie on television and Schooler also said she vividly remembers the commercials.

Throughout the event, P&G will showcase showcase past Bounty ads and highlight key milestones. Workers at the diner will be happy to quickly and easily clean up any messes guests make using Bounty, Baressi added.

Since the brand's inception, Barresi said Bounty has been focused on creating paper towels that are absorbent, strong and can be used for a variety of tasks.

Bounty is used today by more than half of all American households, Baressi said. It's one of P&G's 22 billion dollar brands.

WHO PLAYED ROSIE?

The late Nancy Walker, an actress and director whose career spanned four decades, played the role of Rosie in Bounty's commercials from 1970 to 1990. The 2004 book "Rising Tide: Lessons from 165 Years of Brand Building at Procter & Gamble," credited the petite actress with helping coin the catch phrase describing Bounty as "the quicker picker upper."

As an actress, Walker said she was never able to play a "gray character."

She appeared on Broadway and earned a Tony nomination. Her stage work took her around America, including a 1959 appearance at Cincinnati's Shubert Theater in Noel Coward's "Fallen Angels." Her first film, in 1943, was "Best Foot Forward," where she appeared with Lucille Ball.

In her later years, Walker mostly appeared on television, winning her multiple Emmy nominations. At one point, she was a regular on two series on different networks at the same time: "Rhoda," a comedy on CBS, and "McMillan & Wife," a detective series on NBC. Walker credited her role on "Rhoda," as a Jewish mother that was initially created for "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," with helping her land the Bounty job.

Walker died in 1992 at age 69. Her obituary in the New York Times summarized her career as playing "Rhoda's mother, McMillan and wife's housekeeper and a paper-towel-promoting waitress in television commercials, along with a strong of brassy, loudmouthed cutups on Broadway."