Recently The Toddler’s daycare held a silent auction to raise funds for supplies and activities. Among the items up for bid were a few Wrigley’s “packages” – Wrigley’s as in gum, not as in the playing field of the Chicago Cubs baseball team. The packages were stuffed with pens and a travel mug emblazoned with the Wrigley’s logo, along with a couple of packs of Wrigley’s Orbit bubble gum.
If the Wrigley’s packages had contained tickets to a Cubs game instead of bubble gum, they would have almost certainly drawn a heated bidding war. I know this because I donated a pair of tickets to a Cubs game for the auction that caused a last-minute bidding frenzy and a disputed call on the final bid that nearly caused a dugout-clearing brawl.
The bidding over bubble gum didn’t get nearly as sticky. In the true spirit of charity, two of the auction organizers each agreed to place nominal bids on the bubble gum so that it wouldn’t go un-chewed. As it so happens, one of those organizers is my wife, who kept the pens and the travel mug and left the bubble gum for me.
My wife, you see, never mastered the fine art of bubble gum mastication. I, on the other hand, learned to masticate at an early age and still find joy in it, albeit not as frequently as I did in my youth.
An avid collector of baseball cards, I was hooked on bubble gum at an early age. Each pack contained a hard-as-rock stick of bubble gum whose oils, I would learn later in life, ruined any value those cards might have otherwise had for future collecting purposes.
As a kid connoisseur of the chewy delights of bubble gum, my adolescent mouth became a cavity-filled goldmine for my dentist. But my distaste for dental work didn’t stop me from chewing bubble gum.
To date, only three bubble gums have earned a place in my personal Bubble Gum Hall of Fame. They are Bubs Daddy, Bubble Yum and Freshen-Up.
Bubs Daddy – a foot-long rope of bubble gum – I was introduced to at the Little League concession stand in the early seventies. The flavor – my favorites were grape and sour apple – didn’t last all that long, but it didn’t have to. You just took another bite off the end of the stick. By the time you reached the end, you literally had a mouthful. Today Bubs Daddy's name has apparently been changed to Super Bubble Long Lasting. Personally, I like the old name better.
Bubble Yum is deserving of landmark status as the first soft bubble gum to hit the market. Gone were the days of breaking your teeth on Bazooka Bubble Gum (the bubble gum with the Bazooka Joe cartoon wrapped around it). Gone also was the waiting period on bubble blowing. And boy could you blow bubbles – bubbles as big as your face, which oftentimes ended up coated in a Bubble Yum mask. About a year after making its debut in 1976, a false urban legend that Bubble Yum contained spider eggs or legs quickly burst the Bubble Yum marketing bonanza.
In the late seventies came Freshen-Up, the square gum with the liquid center, which gets its place in my Bubble Gum HOF for that addictively weird gooey feeling that occurred when that liquid middle burst. I recall Freshen-Up eliciting an obscene nickname on the playground that I will leave to your imagination.
All of the aforementioned bubble gums I was introduced to in the seventies. Not since then have I found a worthy addition to my Bubble Gum HOF. Until now, that is.
There are times when good fortune strikes you when you least expect it, and this is one of those times. I am thrilled to announce today that Orbit is the newest member of my elite Bubble Gum HOF, garnering the single vote needed, from me, to earn its place in history.
My first discovery was that Orbit is clearly not marketed to kids but to adults like myself who sometimes long for that bubble gum flavor but are too embarrassed to buy bubble gum. Once past the plastic wrapping, you see this clearly. The bubble gum is packaged as if each piece is a gem – stored in a re-closeable pack with each pieced individually wrapped in paper. The bubble gum pieces themselves resemble slightly stretched Trident gum, which are lined up in two rows of seven.
So did the taste live up to the sophisticated packaging? Yes, it did. The gum is soft and has a long-lasting bubble gum flavor. It is also sugar-free – although it is clearly stated on the packet that it is NOT A LOW CALORIE FOOD.
Wrigley advertises Orbit as “bubblemint”, asserting that it gives you JUST BRUSHED CLEAN FEELING. If there are bubble gum flavored toothpastes, I suppose they might leave you with the feeling I had in my mouth – not really clean but filled with nostalgia.
Biting into that bubble gum brought me back to a time when a pocketful of change was not a nuisance to be dumped unceremoniously into a jar but had real value. Those pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters bought a lot of bubble gum in those days.
And now, thanks to a default charity bid, I can taste what that felt like, so many moons ago, all over again. That’s me, over there – the kid with the well-worn baseball cap, hanging out in the candy section of the Ben Franklin five-and-dime, counting every penny in his pocket.
Wednesday, April 27, 2005 at 09:05PM 