What are you chewing?
I walked into his apartment, and my first thought was: He looks like a retired accountant. Which is entirely fair, since Walter Diemer was in fact an accountant for Fleer Corporation in Philadelphia at the time when he became a young man who changed the world. He resembled the other residents in the retirement home — except that this one had, long ago, done something quietly momentous. With what he cheerfully described as a mixture of fortune, interest and a dash of competence, he invented the elastic, usually bright-pink stuff known as bubble gum. Dubble Bubble, to be precise. “I never thought it was anything that’d last,” Diemer said to me on that spring day. “I thought it’d be here today, gone tomorrow.” It was not.
From one test kettle, Diemer’s concoction stretched forward toward becoming an American institution — the stuff of kids, baseball players and anyone else who wanted to chew. By the 1970s, it was a chewing-tobacco alternative for big-league ballplayers, to the point where Topps — the sports-card company that in those days packaged its wares with slabs of bubble gum — held a bubble-blowing contest. The winner, Milwaukee Brewers’ journeyman Kurt Bevacqua, was depicted on a 1976 card with his offering being officially measured by a Bazooka-branded bubble forceps. As Diemer remembers it, the invention unfolded like this.
Walter’s boss sequestered the newbie accountant in an upstairs room near chewing-gum production machinery. Placed next to Diemer was a kettle with proto-bubble gum inside. He was told to keep an eye on it. The stuff started to bubble.” Diemer was a creative sort, and many experiments ensued, leading to the use of cinnamon and wintergreen — both flavors that remained in the Dubble Bubble recipe many decades later. He also made it pink — because that was the only food coloring around the factory. Unlike so many pioneers and innovators, he lived to see his concoction popped into countless mouths and affixed annoyingly to the bottoms of countless shoes. He left the impression that he was a bit astonished that this corner of history somehow was reserved for him. “I think to myself, `Wow. All over the world kids are enjoying bubble gum,’ he told me. “I love knowing that kids are having fun. I haven’t made a lot of money out of this. But there’s a lot of satisfaction in doing something people enjoy.”
Gumming up the works
A man is sitting on the E train, enthusiastically chewing gum.
After a while, an elderly lady leans forward from opposite seat and says:
“Sir, it’s very kind of you to tell me so much, but unfortunately I’m deaf!”
My son got sent home from school today for chewing gum in class.
I had to phone the teacher and explain to her that he’s only trying to give up smoking.
Why did the gum cross the road?
t was stuck to the chicken’s foot.
What is the preferred chewing gum of Chinese communists?
Ho Chi MINT
November 13th Birthdays
1980 – Monique Coleman, 1959 – Tracy Scoggins, 1989 – Candice Harris, 1963 – Julia Michaels
1963 – Vinny Testaverde, 1970 – Gerard Butler, 1967 – Steve Zahn, 1960 – Niel Flynn