Do you enjoy chewing gum? One doesn’t see people chewing it so much anymore, but it was sort of a life staple when I was growing up.

There was lots of it out there — and even down there, the sides of the streets of NYC were like reverse leopard pelts. There were flat white spots on the asphalt along all curbs, where people would grossly spit their chewed gum once they were finished chewing out the sugary taste. Then of course cars would drive over it and leave flat gum spots, unless of course someone stepped in it and then, ugh, what a horrid mess, especially on warm days.

Chewing gum spit on the sidewalks or streets should have been against the law. Maybe it is/was.

There’s a great history around chewing gum but there’s always a risk here that readers will be bored if one gets too wordy, so I won’t go there today. But when you were a kid were you told if you swallowed your gum you’d die? Or that it would somehow drift out of your stomach and attach itself to your ribs to stay there, seriously endangering your life for whatever years you had left? Me too. So we’d chew and chew until it was a grey tasteless mass, and then once the fear of death by chewing gum had passed, we’d spit it out, but always, or almost always obeying the rule that chewed gum must, on penalty of parental death this time, be wrapped in paper before being tossed.

If we kids didn’t wrap-and-toss we not only had to scrape it out of the waste basket, we had to also clean the garage. Back then the rules were a bit harsher. And, they were enforced. Oh, and it was also forbidden to spit chewed gum into the toilet because, we were told, it would make the whole porcelain thing explode and the mess would be, well, it beggars description.

Those who refused to obey the wrap-and-toss rule we knew were certainly beneath us. Some of those less than savory humans would actually store their semi-chewed gum behind one of their ears, especially if they unexpectedly found themselves in a place where no gum chewing was permitted, like school or church or a job or while being bar mitzvahed, or while getting seen by a physician, and especially if it was determined by the chewer that there was still a bit of sweet life left in the semi-masticated confection. A penny saved, etc.

Of course it was forbidden to chew gum after one went to bed, but we all did it, right? The usual gentle touch of one’s loving mother turned into our suddenly being handled by an enraged all-steel robot as she pulled and cussed and jerked at that hardened gum, applying peanut butter and then ice and then lighter fluid. And then finally, scissors.

We learned our lessons, and from that time on we always stuck our chewed gum behind the bedpost before we went to sleep or beneath a chair. One learns from one’s mistakes.

And let us not forget that the ultimate insult was to refer to someone as a “gum snapping idiot” because apparently if one snapped one’s gum, one automatically suffered from idiocy. I, on the other hand, deeply admired anyone who could make those ear-numbing snaps with their chewed gum.

On another note, blasting out a deafening whistle while inserting my fingers into my mouth was an activity I also could never master,
along with the great art of snapping my chewing gum, and The Force knows I tried. Those were two activities at which I was a consummate failure. I was pretty proficient, however, at blowing large unwieldy bubbles from bubble gum, although I much preferred to chew up those squares of pink gum and swallow them like candy, living on the edge to see if I’d be dead by morning. I never was.

As I aged, I began to realize the gum biz was a big biz and it was not just sugared pieces of rubber sold to an unsuspecting public.

You will love learning about how old the habit is, what trees it comes from and how, how it all got started, how the world’s very wealthy felt about chewing gum, how the Greeks and the Romans were involved, why it was called “gum,” what ancients thought gum was good for, where the word “Chiclets” came from, how Native Americans felt about gum, and how the chewing gum industry became gigantic and prosperous beyond one’s wildest.

LC Van Savage is a Brunswick writer. 

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