Dorothy Corey; Founded Market Research Firm

Dorothy D. Corey, a onetime high school teacher who founded a marketing research firm in an era when most American women were at home trying to feed their families during the Great Depression, is dead.

Mrs. Corey, who began Facts Consolidated in the 1930s after teaching school in Illinois and Missouri, was 93 when she died Thursday in Palm Springs.

She began as a research trainee for the Elmo Roper Organization and several top advertising firms in 1932.

By 1941 she had founded Facts Consolidated with her second husband, Roy Frothingham, and soon their clients came to include General Mills, Union Oil, Pacific Telephone & Telegraph, General Electric, the Los Angeles Times and Anheuser-Busch.

She took her company from San Francisco to Los Angeles just before World War II with a staff of 40 and nearly 500 interviewers, one of the largest research companies on the West Coast.

Because of the diversity of her clients, she dealt with preferences and opinions on food and drink, clothes, bath furnishings, auto choices, reading habits and politics.

Among her many honors was being chosen a Times Woman of the Year in 1961.

Survivors include two daughters, four grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.