A sweet (and chewy) path: One man’s life in gum, and the ripples his innovation caused

NEFFSVILLE, Pa. (AP) — I walked into his apartment, and my first thought was: He looks like a retired accountant. Which is entirely fair, since Walter Diemer was in fact an accountant for Fleer Corporation in Philadelphia at the time when he became a young man who changed the world.

He was 87, living in a retirement village outside a mid-sized Pennsylvania city, when our paths crossed in 1992. He resembled the other residents there — except that this one had, long ago, done something quietly momentous. With what he cheerfully described as a mixture of fortune, interest and a dash of competence, he invented the elastic, usually bright-pink stuff known as bubble gum. Dubble Bubble, to be precise.

“I never thought it was anything that’d last,” Diemer said to me on that spring day. “I thought it’d be here today, gone tomorrow.”

It was not.

From one test kettle, Diemer’s concoction stretched forward toward becoming an American institution — the stuff of kids, baseball players and anyone else who wanted to masticate a small piece of flavored latex until it was ready, with the help of tongue and lips, to become bubble fodder. Early iterations surfaced under the term “bubble balloon gum,” but the middle name fell away.

By the 1970s, it was a chewing-tobacco alternative for big-league ballplayers, to the point where Topps — the sports-card company that in those days packaged its wares with slabs of bubble gum — held a bubble-blowing contest. The winner, Milwaukee Brewers’ journeyman Kurt Bevacqua, was depicted on a 1976 card with his offering being officially measured by a Bazooka-branded bubble forceps.

As Diemer remembers it, the invention unfolded like this.

His boss sequestered the newbie accountant in an upstairs room near chewing-gum production machinery. Placed next to Diemer was a kettle with proto-bubble gum inside. He was told to keep an eye on it.

“Somewhere in 1928,” Diemer said, “the stuff started to bubble.” Diemer was a creative sort, and many experiments ensued, leading to the use of cinnamon and wintergreen — both flavors that remained in the Dubble Bubble recipe many decades later. He also made it pink — because that was the only food coloring around the factory.

Diemer died in 1998. Unlike so many pioneers and innovators, he lived to see his concoction popped into countless mouths and affixed annoyingly to the bottoms of countless shoes. He left the impression that he was a bit — what? — astonished that this corner of history somehow was reserved for him.

“I think to myself, `Wow. All over the world kids are enjoying bubble gum,’ “ he told me. “I love knowing that kids are having fun. I haven’t made a lot of money out of this. But there’s a lot of satisfaction in doing something people enjoy.”

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Ted Anthony swallows his gum. Part of a recurring series, “American Objects,” marking the 250th anniversary of the United States. For more American objects, click here. For more stories on the anniversary, click here.