For at least a dozen years, and probably for a lot longer, versions of this potato-inundated beauty have been circulating around the internet. The captions often suggest that she’s naked under the potatoes, and they usually insist that she’s Miss Idaho 1935 or “Miss Idaho Potato” from the same year. (Amusingly, on Russian-language viral-photo sites the captions typically suggest instead that this is Byelorussian porn.)
I’ve never looked twice at this photo until a skeptical friend asked me about it tonight. As captioned, it struck me as pure bullshit, either photoshopped or taken badly-out-of-context. But once challenged, you know how I simply must look into these things.
Unsurprisingly, the woman is not “Miss Idaho” anything. And she’s not at all naked under all those spuds. But to my very great surprise, she was indeed photographed in 1935, in California. Her name is Dorothy Sommers, and there’s at least one more photograph of her potato-modelling appearance. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Debunking the Miss Idaho memes wasn’t very hard. This photo has been discussed dozens of times on Reddit, and circulated so widely that numerous sources have been moved to point out that Idaho wasn’t really known for potatoes in 1935. And she’s manifestly not naked, either. In the best version of the photo I can find, you can see a line of printed fabric across the upper curve of her breasts:
But what is that curious garment? Allow me to introduce you to the famous burlap gunny sack dress, perhaps most famously modelled by Marilyn Monroe after someone may or may not have snarked that she’d look good even if she wore nothing but a potato sack:
I strongly suspect our potato-meme woman is wearing a similar but less-fashionably-altered garment, or is swathed in actual burlap sacks with potato-farm branding on them.
But where was she photographed? The answer comes from the digital archives of the City Of San Diego, which has a second photo of the same scene:
The San Diego archives date their photo to 1935, and offer this caption:
Dorothy Sommers laying amongst potatoes at The California Pacific International Exposition held in May – November 1935 and February – September 1936.
On Facebook, which I shan’t link, Justine Clark of the San Diego History Center offered the additional detail that the Expo had an “Idaho Day” event during which these photos were taken.
Confirming my gunny sack dress theory, the San Diego Archives photo shows a glimpse of unmistakable burlap fabric texture:
I’ll wind this up with a nice side-by-side of the two photos, something no other researcher appears to have done:
And there you have it. The woman in the wildly-viral “naked Miss Idaho Potato 1935” meme photo is not naked, and not Miss Idaho, but she was the eye candy at a potato publicity event in 1935. As my grandfather used to say, “How about that?”
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