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. A home movie camera caught JFK chewing gum. Perhaps 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. Though there's enough gum around to keep the famous Gum Wall at Pike's Market in Seattle fresh, it's not as fashionable as it used to be.  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.

  

R.I.P. Sam, Bill and Fred

Three college teachers who were important to me have passed away in the past few months.  The most recent was Sam Moon, the professor who sought me out and first talked to me as I was registering for classes at Knox College.  I was there on the Scholastic Magazines Writing Awards Scholarship, and he was head of the writing program (which he pretty much invented.)  I can see his face across the table right now.

He wanted to talk to me before I registered in case I thought I had to take writing courses because of my writing scholarship.  He said I didn't, and probably would have gotten a scholarship anyway.  I had read and re-read the brochure on the writing program the previous spring, and then all summer.  It was one of the main reasons I chose Knox (I had a scholarship to the University of Pittsburgh as well.)  So I told him I actually wanted to take writing courses.  He seemed very pleased.

I did take several writing courses from him, and he was always willing to read and discuss a manuscript even when it wasn't part of a course.  He listened well, asked questions, tried to get inside your thinking.  But he also let you know what he thought, in certain terms.  I don't remember much that's specific, just odd moments of classes or in his office.  I believe--and this applies to other teachers--that a lot of what we learn from teachers that turns out to be most important is what we absorbed without realizing it, or at least without realizing and remembering where we learned it.   

What I do associate the most with Sam Moon however is the bounty of writers and others who spent time at Knox while I was there.  Many of those specific individuals were there because of Sam Moon.  He was himself a poet who published regularly in Chicago's prestigous Poetry Magazine and elsewhere.  He had the respect of writers and he was connected to their world.

So in my time I saw and heard poets from Mark Van Doren to David Ignatov.  I had lunch with W.H. Auden!  Gary Snyder came pretty much directly from Japan for a week one spring, and read for hours every day.  We waited for him in Old Main, listening for the bells in his boots jingling down the stone hallway.  Nobody who was there will ever forget the week that Robert Creeley visited, or (for other reasons) James Dickey. Robert Bly came to read at least twice. These poets changed us.  John Cage came to campus several times, as did dancer Merce Cunningham--and once they were there at the same time, as the Cunningham group performed a piece by Cage.  Grace Paley read her stories. They are part of my college memories--bringing tea to Denise Levertov, talking about the New York Worlds Fair on the Gizmo patio with John Cage ("I liked the lines," he said.)  Others probably had something to do with bringing these people to Knox, but it was pretty much Sam. 

He was also possibly the last Knox teacher I talked to in his Old Main office, when I visited campus in the 1980s. I'd been out of school 15 years or so by then, but he recognized me standing uncertainly at his office door, as a group of undergrad writers surrounded him at his desk. We had a coffee in the Gizmo.

He retired soon after that (I remember I wrote something for a book to be presented to him at his farewell dinner), and I was surprised to see that he left Galesburg soon afterwards.  He had another life, another quarter century somewhere else, in New York state.  He's buried in Ontario.  Our teachers are always something of a mystery to us, as young as we were, but I'll bet Sam was more of a mystery than most.

William Matthews was pretty much the entire Religion department when I was at Knox.  I don't think I ever had a class with him, but for some reason he liked things I wrote, for the newspaper and the campus magazines.  People would tell me that he quoted them enthusiastically in his classes.  I was embarrassed, since it seemed to compromise my lapsed Catholic dogmatic anti-religion.  I did talk with him from time to time, but again, I couldn't feel comfortable, thanks to 12 years of priests and nuns.  I do wonder if he had anything to do with bringing another speaker to campus, who had a profound effect on me.  I don't remember what he was actually talking about, there in the Commons Room of Old Main, but he made one offhand comment that reoriented me completely: he noted that after killing an animal, a Native American hunter would say a prayer thanking the animal.  Eventually this moment would send me on a different road, spiritual and otherwise.

I recently learned from a fellow student who got back in touch after a very long time that Fred Newman died several months ago.  Fred was a philosophy professor who changed more than my life in his time at Knox.  I had only one class with him, and knew him for no more than a year or so.  I could write pages on that spring of my freshman year, and its impact on me for years following.

But I lost complete track of him after Knox, and though I had seen his name from time to time--not usually in flattering contexts, as a kind of New York political eccentric--I was unaware of the extent, nature and influence of his work over the years.  Which is kind of astonishing, since I used to spend a fair amount of time in New York in worlds that touched upon his.  He was political, a "public philosopher", a playwright and songwriter with dozens of productions, etc.  I learned most of this from his website.  It even has sound files of him lecturing--talk about a blast from the past!

I'm sorry that I wasn't aware of this while he was alive. He remained a charismatic figure well beyond Knox, so on the other hand it's unlikely I would have wanted to go through that exhausting experience again.  From his obits I learned something else: that he lost his college teaching jobs after Knox because he insisted on giving all his male students As because of the draft.  I wish I'd known that.  I'd probably need pages more to explain that to those who weren't young men then, but it's something else I will always admire about Fred Newman.

May they rest in peace--Sam, Bill, Fred, if I may call them that.  I probably can.  

Valjean in Mexico just this spring, a photo posted by her friends. May she rest in peace.
R.I.P. Valjean

I mentioned her to someone earlier today, so tonight it occurred to me to check the blog she started when she was diagnosed with lung cancer last December. The last time I checked, she had successfully completed her final round of treatments.

But it turns out that earlier today, her ashes were buried in Chicago. Valerie Jean McLenighan died on July 9. She was 60. Fortunately, she had more devoted friends than I who took very good care of her since her diagnosis.

The photo of her above was taken in Mexico this spring. It's not entirely clear, but it seems things started to get worse upon her return, perhaps on the trip itself. But that photo is how I will remember her.

I hadn't seen her for something like 35 years. We knew each other in college, and then saw each other when we were both in graduate school at the University of Iowa. I don't recall how we got back in touch in the late 80s or early 90s--it was probably at her instigation. She was reconnecting with Knox classmates, urging people to attend the next reunion. We talked on the phone a bunch of times (she did attend that reunion, and told me about it), from when I lived in Pittsburgh to after I moved to California. She almost visited here when she was in San Francisco, but it never worked out. We also emailed, and in one of hers, just before the Democratic Convention in 2004, she told me to watch the speech by a state legislator named Barack Obama, because he was something special.

I have a number of specific memories of Valjean. But at the moment I can't write about them. I'm just grateful that she had good medical care and lots of loving care from her friends. Her engagement with people was amazing--she was so much more outgoing than I ever was, and yet she had such a deep internal life. And I guess I'm a little daunted, too. I expect my death will be a good deal lonelier.

Valjean was a practicing Buddhist, and there will be a memorial service for her at her Zen Center this Sunday. But in August, there will also be a Mass for her, and a memorial in Chicago being organized by her friends. If there are others from Knox checking in here who didn't know about this and are interested in the memorial, information will be posted on her blog.

On the day she died, a friend of hers named Steve McCabe posted a poem by Wallace Stevens he said was one of her favorites. It means a lot to me, too--there's a copy of it just a few feet away. Valjean and I were in a class together, taught by Doug Wilson, on the poetry of Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens. So we came to this poem together:

Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:
Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

Waters Rising

We were about an hour from Burlington, Iowa--the first photo, pictured today--and I went there a few times when I was a student at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. Out of the five years I was in the area (there and at the U. of Iowa in Iowa City), I can recall going out to fill sandbags and so on during three springs.
That's sandbagging this week in Iowa City in the second photo, and part of the flooded U. campus in the third. It was never this bad when I was in the area. I was a freshman at Knox stuck on campus during spring break when I went out with a few other students to help on some levees in the hot sun. A Red Cross truck came by with food and drink, and that's still one of the best meals of my life. Another year we sandbagged at Acquaca, after which we repaired to the Blue Parrot bar. Never anything like this. My thoughts are with those folks today.

Update 6/27: Flooding has been widespread and it continues. I remember being out there on the levee where we were told to fill up muskrat holes. I thought that was kind of silly. But not today--when a single muskrat hole in Winfield, Missouri led to a levee breach, and a town flooded.

from the Knox Magazine

Captain Toothpaste Returns


WHO IS CAPTAIN TOOTHPASTE? asked the bold print on the last page of the Knox Magazine spring 2007 issue. That’s easy. I am.

Or I was in 1968. I cut a record under that name, which was included in an issue of the Knox College literary magazine. The song was called “Nightdove.” Thanks to Knox Magazine, you can hear it yourself, right here. That’s me singing and playing guitar. I also wrote it--my real name is on the label as well, paired with a “J.Rider” as co-author. That was me as well.

I was also the co-editor of the magazine, with Wendy Saul. It was called “The Siwasher” then. Knox College was known as “Old Siwash” from stories written about it using that mythical name. It also turned out to be something of a racial slur which Native Americans found offensive. Our Spring 1968 issue was the last one with that name. Some years later, the school officially dropped references to Siwash, and adopted a new name for its sports teams.

The magazine had followed the same format for the years I was there: student stories, poems and reproductions of art works. After publishing such an issue in the fall, we decided to go multimedia. We broke out of the book with 8x10 reproductions of the work of four photographers, plus an art poster suitable for hanging. We talked a lot about how popular music in the 60s was a vital and representative art form for our generation, so we wanted to include records. We kept to our budget for all this by collecting the usual stories and poems in a booklet with a generic cover. And we put it all—book, photos, poster and two records---in a manilla envelope, with a poem by Howard Partner on the flap.

The record with the hot pink label (both were small but played at 33 1/3 format) featured Rick Clinebell’s rendition of the Joni Mitchell tune, “The Urge for Going,” on one side, and three cuts on the other side: a piano duet of an original work by Karen Janecek, a tune by the Knox folk group, Four in the Morning, and a rock tune by the Bushes.

The record with the yellow label had three tunes by the bluegrass Stoney Hollow Boys: Rick Lindner, Tom Stern and Mark Brooks, all from our class of '68. And on the other side, “Nightdove” by Captain Toothpaste.

Rick Clinebell was our music director. I was about to take the tapes of all the music to a record company in one of the Quad Cities (Davenport?) when he rushed me into a practice room in the Fine Arts Center with his guitar to re-record “Nightdove,” because something was wrong with the original tape. So I played and sang it just once, messed up the lyrics a little, but that was all the time I had. That’s what’s on the record now.

The recording studio where the tapes were turned into masters and then into records was run by an older gentleman and his wife. She loved the name “Captain Toothpaste.” She said she thought of it at night when she brushed her teeth and it made her laugh. While she was telling us this, her husband was at his mixing board, and asked me if I’d like some echo added to my song. I said sure. I was there with Wendy and Barbara Cottral. It was a sunny spring day. Later we had sandwiches at a little airport, watching small planes take off and land.

The print part of that last issue of the Siwasher were stories by Barbara Ann Cottral (now the famous story writer, Barbara Bean) and Jeremy Gladstone, a play by Sherwood Kiraly (now the famous novelist, Sherwood Kiraly), and poems by Nicholas Brockunier, Harvey Sadow (the world famous ceramicist), Wendy Saul (the famous writer,) Anne Maxfield, Bob Epstein, Phil Ralston, Linda Pohle and me. The next fall the magazine became “Catch.” I had a story in that first issue, too.


I don’t really remember but the whole multimedia thing was probably my idea. Influenced partly by Marshall McLuhan, I was fascinated with the idea of creating interrelated works in various media, specifically of publishing a novel that would be packaged with its own movie and soundtrack. It was barely practical then, and of course it’s much more doable now. I did something like it in the mid 1980s, when I recorded two songs (“The Malling of America” and “Mall Rats”) in the studio with musicians and backup singers, etc., to go along with my book, The Malling of America. The songs were a big hit at my speaking engagements for awhile, and actually got some radio play.

The “Captain Toothpaste” identity was very 60s, of course. Although there’s a homage in there to Howdy Dowdy, too, who was sponsored by Colgate toothpaste, creators of Happy Tooth and Mr. Tooth Decay. Also some satire on commercial culture that included the music industry.

Especially with that little echo added, “Nightdove” turned out to be kind of country surrealism. It reflects a lot I was feeling and thinking about at the time, especially in view of the world we were being drafted into a few weeks later.

Of course I’ve long since left such youthful preoccupations and pretensions behind. And I’m much too mature to call myself Captain Toothpaste. These days I’m known to readers of Daily Kos, Soul of Star Trek and everywhere on the Internet as Captain Future.

It is as Captain Future that I was invited to chair a panel this fall at the 40th anniversary Star Trek convention in Seattle, where I met some of my readers, including Walter Koenig (Chekov) and Jonathan Frakes (Riker). I’ve met Leonard Nimoy (Spock), Marina Sirtis (Troi), George Takei (Sulu), Levar Burton (Georgi LaForge) and Nichelle Nichols (Ahura), who introduced me to Neil Armstrong, the first human to set foot on ground not on this Earth. But Captain Future is not all about space. The Climate Crisis on the only world we’ve got is a primary preoccupation of my main site, Captain Future’s Dreaming Up Daily.

But Captain Toothpaste is a part of me, too. Save the nightdove, save the world.

Update 9/9/07: Just got the fall issue of the Knox Magazine, with their follow-up. I don't know why they won't mention blog addresses, especially since they basically got their information from a link to this post. They did add some information about the Stoney Hollow Boys. I don't remember Rick Lindner ever being called "Willy," but they name him and Tom Stern, but also Peter Schramm, former professor of biology, and Ken Pahel, another faculty member, as the string bass player. No mention of Mark Brooks. I distinctly remember him playing a washtub bass, the first I'd ever seen. I wonder whose memory is faulty here. I suppose I can be forgiven for forgetting Peter Schramm, since he failed me in a course which led to my never graduating. It was a course in evolution--pretty ironic, since failing the course selected me as not among the fittest, and doubly ironic because I've written a lot on the subject of evolution since, and have become the go-to guy for reviewing books on it--and science in general--at the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review. I also created the official web page for one of his predecessors, Paul Shepard, one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century, about evolution and so much more.

I also see that our 1967 anti-war poetry reading got into the history of Old Main, and that the post-Kent State/Jackson State takeover of the deans offices in 1970 is described as "peaceful," which it was, apart from the rock band playing in the hall. It was scheduled to be less peaceful, when the college decided to call the cops and have me arrested (or so I'm told.) But we left before then--specifically we declared victory and went home, which was our solution for how to get out of Vietnam.

Though Knox likes to give "credit" for leading that action to former Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta, it was actually me. He wasn't even my chief of staff! Though they did get the name we called ourselves right--"The Students Are Revolting." I ask you, who else but me would have come up with that? I was reading about Dada at the time--and reading our generation's dadaist, Abbie Hoffman. But more about all that another time.

from Jules et Jim

The Man Who Loved Movies

This post is personal reminicence, inspired by an issue of the alumni magazine of Knox College, where I was an undergraduate. And if you've arrived here from the Knox site, welcome. This particular site has become a more personal one over the past few years, though it's more about personal obsessions than a day-in-the-life.

For those who were at Knox when I was, you might be interested in a couple of other sites I've just started: 60s Now and the Boomer Hall of Fame.

I post on current events affecting the future on Captain Future's Dreaming Up Daily. If you took astronomy with me, and happen to recall my Captain Space hat, you won't be surprised at that title, nor my Soul of Star Trek blog.

And if you'd like to catch up on my past published writing, some of my favorite magazine and newspaper pieces are at Kowincidence. Now, forward to the past.

I was pleased to see Jay Matson on the cover of Knox Magazine, and to read of the Alumni Achievement Awards to David Axelrod and Bill Barnhart.

Though he identifies himself as a philosophy major, Jay Matson was known on campus foremost as a poet, at least by his senior year, when I was a freshman. We were all in awe of him---his quiet, brooding figure defined “the poet” for me. When Mary Jacobson (who I essentially---or was it existentially?-- adored) told me that my writing had been singled out as promising (for a freshman) by Jay Matson, I felt I had something to live up to.

Then I recall visiting his farmhouse several years later, where a water pipe had burst from the cold, and several rooms were virtual skating rinks. I didn’t see him on my visit to Galesburg in the early 1980s, but I did write about his success transforming historic downtown buildings in my book, The Malling of America.

As the editor of the Knox Student, Bill Barnhart honed his journalistic skills in a tumultuous time on and off campus, and he also had to deal with several unruly columnists, like Skip Peterson, Mark Brooks, Kevin Cameron (unless he was gone already), and me: wild men all.

But the person I want to acknowledge most is David Axelrod. David ran the Cinema Club, which I believe was his invention as well. He chose, booked and exhibited foreign films, pretty much monthly as I recall. This may not sound like a big deal now, but consider this: at the time there were few film courses anywhere in American colleges, and none at Knox (I believe the first at Knox was a filmmaking course given by Richard Alexander of the English department in 1967 or so.) Only a few small theatres in major cities showed foreign films at all (and of course this was before video stores and cable TV.) Movies in general were still considered disposable entertainment.

So beginning with my freshman year, I bought the little card that entitled me to see these movies with strange titles, identified as well by the magic names of the directors: Bergman, Fellini, Godard, Antonioni, Truffaut, Kurosawa… I used to read the titles and names and try to imagine what the movie would be like. When I went to them, sitting in the darkness and staring at these strange apparitions of light, I understood very little of what I saw that first year. But gradually I absorbed their vocabulary, and by the time David graduated, I was a film buff for life.

Although my screenwriting efforts got me no further than an entertaining Hollywood lunch with a William Morris agent (our waitress had been a stand-in for Lillian Gish, who she still resembled), and writing and even directing a few videos for clients, I did wind up writing a lot about film, for various periodicals. This not only involved seeing hundreds of movies but doing interviews on Hollywood sets and on one occasion, spending an hour talking with Francois Truffaut, and exchanging letters afterwards. (I even told him about the scene in which he and Godard—his friend and later New Wave rival—have a shootout, in the last play I wrote and directed at Knox. He laughed.)

The resulting article was in Rolling Stone, called "The Man Who Loved Movies." He liked it, and a piece I did on the (now lost) art of double features, which mentioned a pairing of two of his films. Both of them are reproduced over at kowincidence. (Which was a name given to me, by the way, by the ineffably beautiful Mary Jacobson. (I can see her cringing at my word choice.) I used it for the name of my temporary band for my one and only rock and roll record. But that's another story. )

I’m pretty certain I saw Truffaut’s “Shoot the Piano Player” at Cinema Club, probably my first Truffaut film. I just watched the DVD of it last week, with commentary by Annette Indsdorf, Columbia film professor. I met Annette when she was Truffaut’s translator for his U.S. retrospectives in 1979. Just another link in my life that began with the Cinema Club.

With his dark hair falling in his eyes, David was a personality and a presence at Knox. His off campus apartment featured a homemade reproduction of a Modrian painting (“Broadway Boogie-Woogie”)? rendered with colored tape, as assembled by the rapturously lovely Judee Settipani. I remember him as not saying a lot, and saying it softly (not like some of us loudmouths) but after due consideration, making it count.

I remember some of his pronouncements to this day, and not all of them about film, though this one was: he pointed out to me that the world is not black and white, so black and white movies are inherently abstract. It’s a basic concept now, but at the time it was profoundly new, at least to me, and especially impressive because it seemed to be an insight he’d reached on his own.

The only times I’ve seen him since Knox were in movie theatres: once in Chicago, and once in the mid 1970s at the Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge, MA. (Actually I ran into him in the adjoining restaurant.) At the time I was practically living at the Orson Welles. I was seeing at least 10 to 20 films a week; once I saw 10 movies in one day. I may be an extreme example, but I’m sure there are others whose lives were enriched by what David Axelrod began, as a student at Knox.

UPDATE: If you're interested in David's more recent activities, his web site is, strangely enough, davidaxelrod.com. Which isn't the no-brainer it might seem to be, because there are lots of David Axelrods out there in cyberspace. So I figure he had to be pretty quick to get that url.

Of Popcorn and the Internet

The Internet, and its best search engines have made a dramatic difference in researching all kinds of facts, and this fact is often extolled. For example a recent David Kippen piece in the San Francisco Chronicle noted that tracing the origins of popular expressions, which was next to impossible before, is now often a simple matter of wading through the Google hits.

It's all true as far as it goes, but the truth is there is still a limit to how far that is, and how revolutionary Internet research actually may be. There is a lot of information that isn't on the Internet, or isn't generally accessible. There are still proprietary data bases and search engines that cost big bucks to use (Lexus/Nexus being the prime example, but there's also the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary for etymologies and origins that go back past the last scouring of web sites on the net.)
And of course there is all the inaccurate and/or contradictory information endlessly replicated as it echoes across cyberspace.

I ran into some of these difficulties in trying to trace down what would seem to be a simple fact--- trying to find a kernel of truth as it were, concerning the origin of popcorn.

I was reading a collection by the eminent contemporary American essayist Edward Hoagland, specifically an essay about a cross-country train trip. One brief aside caught my eye: in recounting his transit through the American Midwest on one of the Amtrak Zephyrs (a route west from Chicago), he produces this catalogue: "A bulldozer factory at Aurora; pig farms at Princeton; the Spoon River at Kewanee. Popcorn was invented in Galesburg. Monmouth is where Wyatt Earp was born."

Popcorn was invented in Galesburg. I don't suppose that would be of more than momentary interest for most readers, but I went to college in Galesburg, Illinois, and I had never heard that particular fact stated before. I knew that Galesburg was the birthplace of Carl Sandburg, that Ronald Reagan lived there for awhile in his boyhood, that Eugene Field, Edgar Lee Masters and Jack Finney (Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, etc.) went to college there at least briefly, that Lincoln and Douglas debated there and that it was an important stop on the Underground Railroad, that Dorothea Tanning escaped from there to become the only woman surrealist painter in France and to marry Max Ernst and then become an important American painter. I even knew that the inventor of the Ferris wheel, George Ferris, was born there, and that Galesburg had once supplied the nation with bricks. But I'd never heard anything about popcorn.

Still, the place was and in surrounded by corn fields, so popcorn made sense. Then shortly after I read this, I found myself mentioning it in a book review I was writing, on a book about the French New Wave filmmakers. It so happens that I saw my first French New Wave films---in fact, my first non-Hollywood films---in Galesburg, thanks to the Cinema Club at Knox College. The Cinema Club was a student run organization; in fact, a one-student organization, and that one was David Axlerod, who has since been involved in movies and TV. (Unfortunately, there are a number of David Axlerods in the entertainment business, and I'm not sure of his resume. A problem, incidentally, one would encounter when researching on the Internet.)

David and the Cinema Club constituted my first education in film. As I recall, these films were usually screened in the big theatre in the Fine Arts Center. It wasn't a bad venue for seeing movies, but it wasn't a real good one, either. It was an multi-purpose venue, used mostly for main-stage live theatre productions. I saw my first production of Hamlet there, starring a student named Jim Eichelberger, who later became known as Ethel Eichelberger, a theatrical legend on the East Coast. I've seen a half dozen film versions and probably that many stage productions of Hamlet since, but that was the definitive one. That was Hamlet. The only time I acted in Shakespeare (the absolutely key role of the Thane of Ross in Macbeth) was on that stage.

But it wasn't the best place for watching films. Even if it had been, I'm sure my memory of the "foreign films" I saw there would be murky. I didn't know the language. Not just the languages the films were in---French, Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Japanese---but the film language. It took me a year of just showing up and watching before I knew how to see what I was seeing.

I mentioned this, with much greater brevity, in the first paragraph of my review. I thought it would be amusing to identify Galesburg as the birthplace of popcorn, since these days especially, popcorn is the more reliable pleasure to be found at the movie theatre. So I put it in there as a coy parenthetical, and sent my copy hurtling through cyberspace to my editor's email account.

It was days later that I started having second thoughts. I think it was one night as I was falling asleep, although it may have been just as I was waking up. But it was in one of those regions of foggy illumination that a nagging suspicion that had been in my mind from the beginning forced itself to the surface: that popcorn thing just didn't sound right.

Specifically, I had the image of a popcorn necklace in the Pilgrim's Thanksgiving story. And something about the Mayas. I realized that I knew that popcorn was a Native American legacy, and unless Hoagland's source referred to the Illinois Indians, the Galesburg reference was wrong.

Of course I should have researched it before. I learned at least as long ago as high school debate and probably even in seventh grade not to trust a single source. What does "invented" popcorn mean anyway?

Still, there was probably---here it comes again---a kernel of truth in this corny story. Galesburg probably had something to do with popcorn.

So I went to Google. And therein lies my tale about Internet research.

First I tried "popcorn invented Galesburg." (Google ignores "common words" like "in," so I didn't bother writing "popcorn invented in Galesburg"). Sure enough, several references popped up. One was an article by the travel writer Paul Theroux, an even better known source that Hoagland. There were several others. But oddly, they all said the same thing in almost exactly the same way: Galesburg, where popcorn was invented.

One of the sources was trainweb.com, and I think this is the mother of them all. From what I can tell, Amtrak must supply a list of fun facts about places along the way (I don't think they were doing that when I traveled these routes, which I did pretty often from my college days through the early 1980s.) It looks to me like Hoagland and Theroux were cribbing from the same cheat sheet (especially since that bit about Wyatt Earp comes right after Galesburg in both their accounts, and in the Amtrak p.r.)

I did find one additional bit of information in this search: that the inventing was supposedly done by someone named Olmstead Ferris. Well, there were Ferrises in Galesburg, I knew that from the story of George and his Big Wheel. But a search for "Olmstead Ferris" on the web turned up next to nothing.

So I tried another approach. I typed in "invention popcorn" and "popcorn invented." This yielded a completely different set of sites. They told several different stories. Eskimo.com said popcorn was invented by Quadquina in 1630 at the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Another site ascribed popcorn to Chinese war lords. But most referred back to the "Encyclopedia Popcornia" at popcorn.org. The origin story on this site said simply that Native Americans invented popcorn, and that the earliest fossil popcorn found was dated at 4,000 years old.

Other sites gave different dates and facts, often enough contradicting each other. One site said popcorn was 5,000 years old. Though several said Native Americans simply threw corn on the fire to make it pop, one credited Indians with inventing the first popcorn machine, some 1500 years ago.

Europeans found popcorn being popped by Native tribes throughout North, Central and South America (though its presence at the Pilgrim's first Thanksgiving is disputed.) The Aztecs introduced popcorn to Cortes in 1519. Spaniards munched some in Peru in 1650. And so on.

But among all the names and places these sites mentioned, none referred either to Olmstead Ferris or Galesburg. In other words, there were two parallel universes coexisting on the Internet: one in which popcorn was invented in Galesburg, and one in which Galesburg had nothing to do with it at all.

As we all know by now, computers exist to help us waste time. The Internet is an admirable instrument in this effort. After several hours of frustrating and ultimately ridiculous research, I tried a computer age variation of an old research stand-by: I thought I'd ask somebody.

I pretty easily found the Galesburg Historical Society site, and a name to contact. I sent a somewhat frantic email outlining my problem and the urgency of its resolution, since I needed to correct my copy before exposing myself to ridicule and worse. (On the other hand, I might find out if people actually read book reviews. But maybe that's something I'm better off not knowing.)

I got a quick reply from Joel Ward of the Historical Society, who wrote: "To the best of my knowledge, popcorn was not invented here, but Olmstead Ferris is claimed as the man who introduced it to Europe. There's even a children's story book about it"-and he provided this Internet link:
http://hallkidsillustrators.com/M/634.shtml.

At this site there's a 1997 Kirkus Review of Popcorn at the Palace, by Emily Arnold McCully, which tells the story of Olmstead Ferris and his daughter traveling to London with Europe's first supply of popcorn, and popping some for Queen Victoria. She liked it.

So for my more urgent and narrow purpose, I had an even better story---that Galesburg first supplied Europe with popcorn, thus contributing to the French New Wave movie experience in France. I accept this popcorn story with a grain of salt, because---well, that's how I like my popcorn. Although Joel Ward suggested a couple of other people to talk to, I thought his statement plus the children's book was sufficient evidence for a much more modest claim, so for a parenthetical reference in a book review, I went with it. I sent my editor the correction, and the explanation for same, and with noticeable tact he simply accepted it. The review has not yet been published, and I fully expect this line to be cut in editing anyway, but I did my duty.

About the Internet I learned one has to employ the same standards for evaluating information as in any other research, because the Internet is simply not going to do the work for you, especially when it involves judgment. One cannot count on the Internet to (yet) carry all the information you might require: there are lots of un-digitized books that presumably tell the history of popcorn, and the history of Olmstead Ferris, as well as where they might intersect, in greater detail, perhaps even with attributions. One also cannot count on Google or any other single search engine to turn up everything that is on the Internet. (The reference to this children's book didn't turn up on my searches, though when I varied the terms a little on a later search, it did.) And on the Internet as in other kinds of research, persistence and creativity count.

And finally, that even after exhausting every reference on the Internet, you may still not know the answer. Either it isn't there, or you need some other reference you can trust to help you know what to believe. For instance, a person with credentials and credibility, who will answer your questions.

By the way, Olmstead Ferris was George Ferris's uncle. Somehow popcorn and the Ferris Wheel do belong in the same family.

Of course, there is a site that says that George's uncle---the one who introduced popcorn to Europe---was named Nate.