“Gimme a pack of Beeman’s Pepsin Gum — I ate too much at dinner.”
It’s the 1950s, and here I go, taking the fellow’s nickel and ringing up another sale at my parents’ store.
“Take it easy,” I say fraternally as another satisfied customer heads out. Now that I know his dining habits, I’m sure he’ll be back in a week or so for another pack.
I wondered in those days if the claims made by makers of consumer products were real. But uncertainty didn’t keep me awake at night as long as Mom and Dad’s store could make people happy, one foil-wrapped stick at a time.
Beeman’s, by the way, was reputedly a good antidote to the gas pains and queasy stomach brought on by overeating, which often meant chowing down on one too many sausage and pepper sandwiches at a church or firefighters’ bazaar. Medical claims or not, I liked it.
But we live in 2025. Whatever happened to chewing gum?
I was checking out at the supermarket the other day when I glanced at a gum display that hardly even deserved to be called a gum display. It contained a few sugarless brands, and that was it. Yes, that was it.
I thought our little shop in the Heights would go bankrupt if we didn’t have at least 20 or more flavors and brands of chewing gum displayed next to the cash register.
We had aromatic spearmint, fruity, and peppermint gums, all different brands designed to give folks their daily ration of sugar, ease their nerves, and help them banish forever the specter of bad breath, which, as everyone knew, would keep a person poor and lonely.
Of course, we had the off-flavors of licorice and teaberry plus candy-coated Chiclets and probably a few others that I — like most of America — can’t remember. When green chlorophyll-flavored gum came out and was hyped as an aid to health and good manners, of course, we stocked that, too.
There was even (forgive me) a popular laxative gum that was hawked on TV as promoting “regularity,” surely one of the greatest advertising euphemisms of all time.
Society believed in gum back then. I’m sure my mother was not the only mom of the time who carried a pack of Juicy Fruit in her purse, handing me a stick if we had to get on the bus and go out in public together.
People chewed gum everywhere they went. Once you became known as a chewer, it was tough to get through a day without someone who’d used up his last stick asking if you “got some gum.”
Gum’s popularity had its dark side, though. If you were seated in a restaurant and, in an excess of curiosity decided to look under the table while waiting for your grilled cheese with fries, you’d see an incredible collection of ossified and evil-looking wads stuck there over the years by chewers who hadn’t thought about the sanitary purpose of the wrappers.
Fearing even worse, I’d never even considered poking under a movie theater seat during a slow scene.
But the real offenders, for my money, were the cretins who’d spat their chewed-up gum on the sidewalk. Stepping into a big wad (at least five sticks worth) that had melted in the July heat was the closest you could get, I used to think, to blundering into quicksand.
What killed off gum? Dental health? Image?
Oh, who knows.
About all I can say is, “chew on that for a while.”
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