THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, July 8, 1996 TAG: 9607070417
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Larry Maddry
LENGTH: 70 lines
THERE MAY NOT BE many constants left in a shifting, complex, computerized world but - by gosh - the Tootsie Roll is one of them.
So much has been going on with Filegate and the bombing in Saudi Arabia that you may have overlooked the fact that the chocolaty, chewy Tootsie Roll is celebrating its 100th anniversary.
In honor of the anniversary I just finished one of the little brown beauties. Not quite as tasteful as when I was a lot younger and hungrier.
But it still tasted good, a blend of cocoa, sugar, milk and corn syrup.
The Tootsie Roll is very much like the Zippo lighter - another durable and nearly indestructible product that always seems to work.
There's never been a candy like it. In fact, only a fool would make a candy that looks like something our veterinarian asks for in a covered container when doing a worm check.
The fool - a very clever guy as it turns out - was Leo Hirschfield, an Australian immigrant who brought his candy recipe to the U.S. in 1896. He named the candy for his 5-year-old daughter Clara, nicknamed ``Tootsie.''
Tootsie has come a long way, baby. Tootsie Roll Industries has a factory that can crank out 49 and one-half MILLION Tootsie Rolls a day! If the number of Tootsie Rolls produced in a single year were placed end to end they would stretch to the moon and back.
I remember the Tootsie Roll best from the sandlot baseball games of my youth. The Tootsie Roll was made for baseball. I stuffed a large Tootsie Roll in my back pocket before the game. It would last for all nine innings.
Other candy bars would get smashed to pieces when you sat on them in the dugout. Not the Tootsie. In the outfield - my usual position - when you wanted a burst of energy you just bit off a chaw. You could smell the candy's brown waxy-sweet scent back there in your pocket, along with the smell of onion grass under your feet.
More important, perhaps, is that a Tootsie made you look and feel like a ballplayer. You bit off a chaw as though tearing into a plug of tobacco. It bulged your cheek like a wad.
And when you spat - spitting and scratching are what baseball has always been about - it looked just as brown and disgusting as when major leaguers did it.
Chocolate bars might melt in your mouth but they also melted in the sun. Not a Tootsie. And it rarely if ever got attacked by ants, which were always lingering around the dugout or swarming over ant hills beyond the infield. If ants got on a Tootsie, you just brushed them off and ate it. For the ant, invading a Tootsie was like trying to get inside a chocolate-covered crowbar.
The Tootsie Roll seems like a blue-collar person's candy, but there have been some rich and prominent folks who loved 'em. One was Frank Sinatra - who insisted on having them in his hotel room whenever he was booked for an engagement. And singer Sammy Davis Jr. used to toss them to audiences whenever he sang ``Candy Man.''
Nobody at the Tootsie headquarters in Chicago knew what the record was for a Tootsie Roll that held its shape and flavor over the years. But one thing is clear, the Tootsie is the candy equivalent of the Egyptian mummy when it comes to longevity.
``We have some that were made in 1938 that we still eat,'' said Melvin Gordon, Tootsie Roll Industries board chairman.
And no one knows what the record number of dental fillings sucked from teeth by a single Tootsie Roll is, either. But the company has received a letter from a dentist who said he used a mass of Tootsie Rolls rather than dental clay when making a mold for dentures.
Oh, I almost forgot. That factory in Chicago can spit out 1,050 pieces of the candy a minute.
Talk about being on a roll. ILLUSTRATION: The chocolate candy was named after its inventor's
daughter, "Tootsie." by CNB