The best gum editorial ever
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.