DISPOSABLE DIAPERS ARE A REAL HIT

Joyce Bock can't imagine life without disposable diapers.

"It is just so convenient," said the Oak Ridge mother as she held her 6-month-old daughter Taylor in her arms at the SEMO District Fair Wednesday.

Bock stopped by Procter & Gamble's diaper changing station at the Fair.

The diaper changing station is a popular spot with parents. The company manufactures Luvs and Pampers disposable diapers at its Cape Girardeau County plant.

P&G hands out thousands of free diapers during the weeklong Fair.

Fittingly, this week marks the 35th anniversary of the invention of Pampers disposal diapers.

Vic Mills was a P&G chemical engineer in 1956, when he decided to try to find a way to avoid the mess of his granddaughter's cloth diapers. The result was Pampers, which helped create a multibillion-dollar industry.

In 1959, the yet-unnamed diaper was publicly tested in Rochester, N.Y.

Since manufacturing equipment hadn't been perfected, P&G staff assembled 37,000 diapers by hand.

Early names considered for the product included Tads, Solos and Larks, but Pampers was the name that stuck with consumers.

In 1961, Pampers was officially tested in Peoria, Ill.

Parents were interested in the concept, but didn't consider Pampers to be an everyday product.

Many parents used Pampers only on special occasions like traveling and for babysitting.

The product was so novel that merchants were puzzled about where to stock it, according to officials at P&G's corporate headquarters in Cincinnati.

Over the years there have been numerous improvements from refastenable tapes to stretch panels.

Today, 81 percent of hospitals nationwide use disposable diapers and 94 percent of parents rely solely on disposable diapers, according to P&G officials.

More than 8 million babies in this country under the age of 30 months wear them. About 16 billion diapers are disposed of each year.

Pampers is sold in more than 90 countries and is the best-selling diaper worldwide.

In the United States, rival Kimberly-Clark Corp. of Dallas holds the market leadership.

Its Huggies brand has about 40 percent of the $3.6 billion U.S. market for disposable diapers and training pants.

Pampers' annual sales of $928 million amount to a 26 percent share.

Janet Schaeffer of Oran works for the P&G plant in Cape Girardeau County.

On Wednesday she handed out diapers in the company's pink-and-blue tent at the Fair.

Mother of three children, Schaeffer remembers when disposable diapers were rarely used.

When her first child was born in the early 1970s, she primarily used cloth diapers.

At that time, disposable diapers didn't have tape fasteners; parents had to use safety pins just as they did with cloth diapers.

By the time her second child was born in 1976, disposable diapers had become a necessity with parents.

P&G employee Cindy Gadberry of Chaffee remembers seeing her younger sister in cloth diapers.

Gadberry said disposable diapers weren't common in this area until the late 1960s.

Gadberry, who has three children, has a solid appreciation of disposable diapers.

"You don't have to clean out the messy diaper," she said.

Parents might complain that diapers are expensive today. But Gadberry said disposable diapers were never cheap.

But Schaeffer said parents had other costs with disposable diapers, such as all the bleach used to clean them.

"I don't think young people even know what a cloth diaper is," she said.

Today cloth diapers are used as burp cloths and cleaning rags. "They are good to clean windows," said Schaeffer.

Besides being convenient for parents, disposable diapers have been an economic boon for the area.

P&G's sprawling Cape Girardeau County plant opened in 1969.

Today, it employs 1,300 people. Another 500 to 600 people work for independent contractors at the plant who handle everything from the guard service to the cleaning service.

The plant makes both Pampers and Luvs diapers.

It is the biggest of P&G's three diaper plants in the United States, said plant spokesman Larry Stahlman.

The plant has 30 acres under roof.

But that isn't what impresses Joyce Bock and other parents. For them, nothing beats a dry baby.