A n d r e w s G u m W o r l d

Fleer’s Dubble Bubble Gum ad, 1960s, originally uploaded by bayswater97.

Late in July, one of AndrewsGumWorld’s very first posts was a video of a lady blowing a world-record sized bubble on a Spanish television.

That lady’s name was Susan Montgomery Williams, and yesterday’s Fresno Bee reported on her untimely death last week at the age of 47.

As the earlier video attests, Williams’ bubble-gum blowing feats made it on to a number of television shows both throughout the United States and the world, and she also had her own website which chronicled some of those appearances, and describes the 19 1/4-inch bubble that brought her the world record in 1994 (and how she later broke it by blowing a 23-inch bubble on television).

As her obituary notes, she received notoriety not only for her record-making bubbles, but for the noises they made when they popped, which also led to arrests at a Smokey Robinson concert and outside a Fresno murder trial.

She will be best remembered, though, for blowing amazingly large bubble gum bubbles, far beyond those than most of us can ever imagine…or attempt.

Our condolences to her family and those who loved her.

Here are the opening lines of yesterday’s obituary:

Susan Montgomery Williams, a Fresno woman with a talent for blowing enormous chewing gum bubbles, parlayed that skill and a keen understanding of the news media’s enthusiasm for superlatives into eccentric international semi-celebrity.

Mrs. Williams, 47, died Wednesday of an aneurism after suffering a stroke the week before, apparently unrelated to her hobby.

She had painstakingly inflated her bubble gum abilities into appearances on the Johnny Carson and Jay Leno late-night television programs. Her talent won her travel for appearances on broadcasts in Spain, Germany, England and Japan.

Patents Pending, originally uploaded by Epiclectic.

Wrigleys—Real-America-04-35, originally uploaded by LotusMonger.

Matchbook: Wrigley’s Spearmint Takes on the New York World’s Fair,
originally uploaded by R.Berdar.

 A story in today’s Syracuse newspaper, The Post-Standard, talks about an upcoming presentation for local business people that will be made by former Yankees‘ pitcher Jim Bouton (perhaps best known for his autobiography  “Ball Four”).

The story describes Bouton’s various attempts at business ideas, ranging from his first lemonade stand at age 8, to stints in the scrap business, paper delivery and baby sitting.

At age 39, he attempted a comeback to baseball in 1977, and he had an idea for an alternative to chewing tobacco that was making some of his fellow players sick. Here’s how he described how the idea emerged (and then the invention process that grew out of his idea):

“I was playing in Portland, Oregon, Class A,” (Bouton) recalled. “I was sitting in the bullpen one night. The guys are all chewing tobacco, getting sick. This kid sitting next to me, left-handed pitcher by the name of Rob Nelson, says, ‘Too bad there isn’t something that looks like tobacco but tastes good like gum.’ I said, hey, that’s a great idea shredded gum in a pouch.”

A couple of months later, Bouton still had the idea in his head. So he called Nelson and suggested they go into business together and bring the idea to a bubble gum company. They’d call it Big League Chew.

They sliced up bubble gum with scissors and designed a pouch similar to the kind that chewing tobacco comes in. Then came the tough part finding a bubble gum company to make it.

“We went to Topps, Fleer, Life Savers, Leaf, American Chicle,” he said. “They all looked at it and they all said the same thing. ‘This is interesting, Bouton, but we don’t make anything like this.’ I said, ‘Precisely.’ So I learned how tough it is to be an entrepreneur businessman.” Bouton’s persistence paid off, though. It took two years, but he finally found a gum company Amurol Products, a small novelty gum company in Illinois willing to sell it.

Amurol introduced Big League Chew in 1980 and, in the first year selling it, doubled its annual revenues to $18 million.

 William Bothwell’s (that’s him above) “Angles ’n’ Attitudes” in Ontario’s Orangeville Citizen newspaper recently took on the subject of chewing gum in a column titled “A sticky business” (AndrewsGumWorld has noted before that puns run rampant in gum reporting in the media).

Bothwell is, perhaps, arguably a gum curmudgeon, as the opening lines of his editorial below will note, but he also managed to fit, in one column, details on everything from new antioxidant-laden Bonus gum (reported on earlier here), the Alamo, Mexican General Santa Ana’s banishment to Staten Island, gum flavors, Thomas Adams and his role in the invention of gum, the introduction of pepsin powders to gum and the creation of “dentyne” gum, the Greeks, Socrates and more. The entire piece is, truly, an education in the history (past and current) of chewing gum. Check it out, including these opening lines:

 This writer has eschewed chewing gum for longer than he can remember. It is an abstinence to which he intends to stick. One remembers how, coming in from recess at school, it was not unknown to stick a wad of gum under the desk to await future use. Sometimes it remained there until summer holidays came. By then its ‘best-before’ date was long past and the custodians had extra work to do.

All of our teachers thought that if we concentrated on the assigned work we would have neither thought nor need for gum. None of us was as yet able to argue that chewing something other than the tip of a pencil might aid concentration, reduce the stress of the teacherpupil relationship and facilitate the learning process. Anyway, nobody that I can remember was ready in Runnymede Public School to argue with Miss Scott or Mr Hambly. They, by the way, eventually married and, one assumes, had their own tensions to contend with.