Father of the TV Dinner dead at 83

PHOENIX (Reuters) - Gerry Thomas, the former poultry-company executive who helped marry American television with mealtime as inventor of the TV Dinner, has died at age 83, his family said on Wednesday.

Thomas, honored with a Hollywood ceremony in 1999 to mark the 45th anniversary of his innovation, died of cancer at a Phoenix hospice on Monday after a long illness, according to his wife, Susan Mills Thomas.

"He was very proud of the TV Dinner, but it never crossed his mind that he would ever get any notoriety out of it," she told Reuters. "He just ate up the publicity. He was a real ham."

A decorated World War II veteran, Thomas was a marketing executive at C.A. Swanson & Sons in the 1950s when he conceived of the frozen TV Dinner as a solution to the company's post-Thanksgiving surplus of turkeys. Swanson is now a unit of Pinnacle Foods Corp.

Read the complete article at Yahoo!News