Origins: Chewing Gum

ad from the 1930s

 Every year, for who knows how long, Knox College seniors in Galesburg, Illinois (though apparently only men) would receive a mimeographed note in their campus mailbox.  I got one my senior year of 1967-68.  It read:

  “ Mr. Lester Smiley, Vice-President of the American Chicle Company, will be on the campus Friday, February 23.  He would like to hold a group meeting for those men interested in a job opportunity with their company. The interviews will be held on Friday, February 23 in the College Placement Office.  Mr. Smiley is a Knox College graduate and, as you know, we have placed many Knox graduates with American Chicle.”

 I can quote this notice so precisely because I experienced it as a bit of found poetry, and literally stapled it into the draft of the play I was writing, “What’s Happening, Baby Jesus?”  When the play was performed that May, freshman Michael Shain came out in a business suit and recited it, with the cheerful addition: “So come on out and keep America chewing!”  It got one of the bigger laughs of the show.  

Rockford High yearbook 

For decades, American Chicle made chewing gum in Rockford, Illinois, and (at various times) in Newark, Brooklyn, Cleveland, New Orleans, Portland, Oregon and around the world. They don’t make so much of it anymore (in fact, after being swallowed up by a succession of bigger companies—even though swallowing is something you shouldn’t do with chewing gum-- a company by that name no longer exists.) Chewing gum has apparently dropped out of fashion, at least for awhile. But for a long time, America kept on chewing.

 “Chewing gum” as we know it began in the USA, though humans everywhere have been chewing stuff without swallowing it for a very long time.  Some Indigenous peoples in South America (for example)  chewed particular plants for energy and stamina, and/or to get high.  Chewing tobacco is another such instance.

 People chewed various leaves, nuts, twigs and gummy substances for millennia, as breath sweeteners and digestive aids, to stave off hunger and thirst, and just for the fun of it.  Denizens of the far north chewed whale blubber, and Europeans chewed animal fats, sometimes in social hours at the end of meals (hence, perhaps, the expression “chewing the fat” to mean convivial—and trivial—conversation, though the origins of this phrase are obscure, based on what seem to be barely educated guesses.)  By the nineteenth century in America, chewing wax was the popular if not entirely satisfactory favorite.

 But the substances we know as chewing gum had their origins in the 1850s.  For some of us you could say the story starts with Davy Crockett.

 Just about anyone who went to Knox College—or any college-- in the 1960s would have experienced the Davy Crockett craze of the 50s, centered on TV films starring Fess Parker, shown endlessly on the Disneyland anthology hour.  The last of the three supposedly biographical tales was about Davy Crockett joining the heroic band defending the Alamo—150 or so men facing 1500 Mexican soldiers.  After holding the Alamo for ten days, Davy Crockett and his compatriots were all killed in the battle or executed afterwards.  The general of the Mexican forces, who was named but never seen in the Disney film, was Santa Anna.  We knew that name. 

 Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna was not only the General of the army ruthlessly intent on putting down a rebellious attempt of Texas to secede from Mexico—he was also at the time the President of Mexico.  In fact he was President of Mexico at least five times.  He was also the General that soon after the Alamo, was defeated by Sam Houston’s forces, and thereby lost Texas.  Later he was the general (and president) who provoked and then lost a war with the entire United States. 

 Santa Anna’s career was marked by idealism, hypocrisy, vanity, charm, chicanery, avarice, incompetence and betrayal, and by a remarkable ability to survive.  He was also in it for the money.  His brief last term as president was a mockery of a monarchy.  After he was deposed he went into exile, and ended up for a time in—of all places-- Staten Island in New York, where he cultivated a partner in a get-rich-quick scheme.

 There are several versions of this story. In one, he brought with him about a ton of chicle, the sap of the manikara zapota or sapodilla tree, an evergreen found in jungles of southern Mexico and Central America.  His American partner (or employee or go-between-- the exact relationship varies with the telling) was Thomas Adams, a photographer and inventor.  Santa Anna liked to chew the chicle, so Adams was tasked with finding a market for it—as the basis for rubber tires attached to buggy wheels.  Santa Anna convinced him it was a great idea.

  No one was interested.  Then Santa Anna decamped, leaving Adams with a ton of chicle.  He recalled how one of his sons picked up the habit of chewing it from Santa Anna, and got another son, a traveling salesman, to try selling it as a chewing substitute for paraffin wax.  Probably unbeknownst to him, the product had been test-marketed for ages by the Aztecs, who chewed this chictli.  But after a little success, Adams gave it the American mass-production spin by inventing a machine in 1871 that divided the chicle into strips. He also invented the first gumballs. 

An enterprising druggist in Kentucky began adding flavor to the gum, though the taste was medicinal.  Adams then created a licorice-flavored gum he called Black Jack. It was the longest surviving brand of chewing gum, still sticking to the bottom of movie theatre seats almost a century later. Adams sold Black Jack and another venerable brand, Tutti Frutti, through vending machines in New York.  Later he would market Chiclets.   

In the late 1880s, a candy store owner in Cleveland named William J. White, who supposedly invented chewing gum all over again when he mistakenly ordered a barrel of Yucatan chicle, added a peppermint taste. Then other brands familiar to my generation began arriving.  Physician Edward Beeman began processing pepsin for its stomach-soothing properties, and heeded a suggestion to add it to chewing gum: Beeman’s Pepsin Chewing Gum. It was still marketed as such in the 1950s and possibly longer.

 In 1890, Adams brought together several existing manufacturers, including Beeman and White, to form the American Chicle company. Eventually it would become an international giant. Together with production and product refinements (the first Adams chewing gum was the consistency of taffy), chewing gum became a lucrative product. 

Helping that popularity along was a former soap salesman named William Wrigley, Jr., who introduced his Spearmint gum in 1892, followed by Juicy Fruit in 1893.  Wrigley was also a pioneer in advertising and publicity—perhaps giving rise to the expression “selling it like soap.” 

 Wrigley headquartered his own company in Chicago, which became enormously prosperous, presenting the city with the Wrigley Building and the classic ballpark Wrigley Field for his Chicago Cubs baseball team. 

Another company that formed around this time was Beech-Nut, which started out as a baby food company but soon branched out in some weird ways, into chewing tobacco, for instance.  Beech-Nut also entered the chewing gum market with their peppermint, spearmint and Doublemint brands.    

 Like the first manufactured cigarettes and American chocolate bars, the presence of chewing gum in the rations of American soldiers during World War I created a larger market when the soldiers returned, in addition to giving Europe a taste of America. So it was in the 1920s that chewing gum began to be a defining feature of American life, and began its spread to Europe and beyond.  Even Coca Cola briefly got into the act with its own gum.

 By my childhood in the 1950s and adolescence in the early 1960s, chewing gum was a somewhat controversial but still ubiquitous part of the every day.  The brands we knew and chewed included some of the age-old: many early brands failed, but bright yellow Juicy Fruit packages were everywhere, and Black Jack and Cloves rattled down from the lobby vending machines at the movies. 

Chewing gum brands were heavily advertised, including on television (Double your pleasure, double your fun, with Doublemint, Doublemint, Doublemint Gum!) Though chewing gum became associated with rebellious teenagers (teachers generally frowned on it, and institutions hated the mess) it was mainly marketed to adults.  New additives, it was claimed, helped clean teeth and breath as well as calm nerves. If a stick of chewing gum stuffed in your mouth seemed too vulgar, there was cinnamon flavored Dentyne, in a different sized package and divided in petite pieces, marketed as a dental—and mental--health aid.

 There was chewing gum for everything: Aspergum contained aspirin, there were nicotine gums; my father regularly chewed tablets of an antacid gum called Chooz.  By the 1970s there were sugarless gums, marketed as dieting aids. 

My generation got the gum habit from childhood bubble gum.  It had a separate and later history, because it took longer to create a gum that produced durable bubbles. But the techniques were finally perfected, and the Fleer Company began selling Dubble Bubble in the 1930s, though with sugar shortages it devoted its entire production to the armed forces in World War II and didn’t resume domestic sales until 1951.  Around then, Topps began selling Bazooka bubble gum.

 In my childhood we got Dubble Bubble and Bazooka in small, fat squares, wrapped tightly and individually. Both brands were wrapped on the inside with paper containing a comic strip or panel.  For Bazooka it was the adventures of Bazooka Joe.  Dubble Bubble’s hero was called Pud.  Both also included fortunes; Dubble added interesting “facts.”  

In the 1930s, Fleer also started selling packages of bubble gum with cardboard photos of major league baseball players.  By my 1950s childhood, Topps had joined and perhaps surpassed them.  Those packages were single thin rectangles of gum slightly smaller than the cards that we all collected, treasured, traded and played with.  It was also our early form of gambling, as you did not know what players you were getting in each package.

 We also got football cards, with pictures of professional football players (much less popular than baseball players--college and even high school football teams were better known then.)  Eventually there would be cards of many different kinds: from Davy Crockett to the Beatles, Star Trek and Star Wars, and yes (I reluctantly admit) the Brady Bunch. 

A switch from bubble gum to chewing gum exclusively was part of the transition from childhood to adolescence, and the Beech-Nut gums in particular were part of that, if only for sponsoring Dick Clark’s Saturday night music show starting in 1958, which featured many of the current stars lip-synching to their latest singles.  Though this was black and white television, I still remember the dark green package of spearmint gum he would display.

 Chewing gum in a bewildering number of new tastes continues to be sold around the world. Still, as the 20^th century wound down, chewing gum began to lose its cultural flavor.  It was less fashionable, a little déclassé.  Beemans got a boost when the Tom Wolfe book and the 1983 film The Right Stuff revealed it as famed test pilot Chuck Yeager’s favorite ritual before a dangerous flight.  But that didn’t slow the trend downward.

 

Still, even some celebrities kept chewing, if somewhat secretly. One of the last public gum chewers was John Lennon, who famously was seen chewing gum while singing “All You Need Is Love” to an international TV audience.  By the 24^th century, gum is so unknown that when offered a stick of gum by a libidinous desk sergeant in a 1940s holodeck simulation, Doctor Beverly Crusher committed the cardinal rookie mistake, and swallowed it.

 The fortunes of those great chewing gum companies has followed, along with the disappearance of many classic brands.  American Chicle is gone, Beech-Nut is back to making just baby food.  Though now a subsidiary of a candy company, only Wrigley remains an international giant in chewing gum.

 But such is the power of nostalgia for classic chewing gum brands that a wrinkled up package,  a decades-dry stick or related item can fetch tens, hundreds, even thousands of dollars.  And of course it’s become a cliché of my generation to bemoan the bubble gum baseball cards that were thrown away with the other detritus of childhood.   A 1952 Mickey Mantle hauled in $12.6 million. Chew on that awhile.

Gallery

American Chicle Building in Portland, Oregon.

Thomas Adams (and sons) put their name on several products, and the Adams name was used for others long afterwards.  This is one of the brands that didn't last.

Baseball players were known for chewing substances other than chewing gum.  Nevertheless,  Beech-Nut did a series of endorsement ads with prominent players--none more prominent than Stan the Man. 

The classic Dubble Bubble...

In the effort to give chewing gum legitimacy, especially in the early days, companies made various health claims.  Beemans however was sincere--he was a champion of pepsin, and many other companies later used pepsin in their gum, and featured the word prominently in packaging and promotions.

When I tried to recall specific baseball cards I actually had in my collecting years, I could remember of course the prominent names, like Mickey Mantle, Roberto Clemente, etc.  But the actual card?  For some reason the first I recalled was the Gene Baker card with the dark green background.  Gene Baker is a forgotten player from the 50s and early 60s, but his last team was the Pittsburgh Pirates, which I followed religiously, especially in the 1957,58, 59 and World Championship 1960 seasons.  When he came to the Pirates in the Dale Long trade in 1957, I kept waiting to see him but he rarely played, hobbled by injuries and better players in front of him.  He'd been a shortstop, converted to second base in Chicago (sharing the infield with the great Ernie Banks--the two of them were among the first black players in the NL after Jackie Robinson) and a utility infielder in Pittsburgh.  He was on the 1960 team, used sparingly to spell Don Hoak at third and pinch-hit.  He soon retired but stayed with the Pirates organization, and became the first black manager and coach in organized baseball (in the minors), and if only for part of one game in 1963, the first black manager in the Major Leagues.