As a kid, I chewed a lot of bubble gum and do so to this day. In fact, I have a partial bag of “DOUBLE BUBBLE GUM” on my kitchen counter, and am chewing some of it as I write this. The older I get, the harder it is to chew bubble gum due to my TMJ which sometimes causes my jaw to “click” now and then as I’m chewing. Several years ago I checked into getting this repaired. My dentist said a specialist would first break my jaw and then reset it! I passed on the repair since in those days I didn’t have any dental insurance and figured it would be a lot cheaper just to get wise with some big palooka and have him break my jaw for nothing, then go to the emergency ward to have it reset! At least then my medical insurance would have covered that! Like everything else, bubblegum today isn’t as good as it was when I was a kid; it’s not as soft as it used to be either. I miss the “Pud” comics that used to be in  Double Bubble gum too!  Of course, Bazooka Bubblegum had “Bazooka Joe” comics, which are still around today. Occasionally I’ll buy a bag of Bazooka bubblegum just to read the comics, but here again, the comics never make any sense to me. Come to think of it, they didn’t when I was a kid either! Tim and I used to get into big trouble at home with bubblegum. Most every Saturday afternoon we would walk to TEACO and get a bunch of bubble gum in a small brown paper sack. Most of the time we would chew 5 or more pieces at a time and as a result we were able to blow giant bubbles!  They would break and get stuck in our hair resulting in snarls that were very difficult to get out! We didn’t worry too much about it since in those days we rarely combed our hair anyway. (Hmmmm, I guess most times I haven’t outgrown that yet!) We would take it out of our mouths and stretch it and then put it to our mouths and suck in rapidly. This caused a small thick bubble inside our mouths that would crack with a loud noise. Our mother always yelled, “Quit cracking that gum”!  The best bubble gum was Blo Bubble, which was made in Shelby, OH, and the flat rectangular thin bubble gum that came with baseball cards. I was more interested in the great tasting bubble gum than the baseball cards. I bought a pack of baseball card bubble gum a few years ago and naturally the gum wasn’t nearly as good as it used to be.  I also liked the bubble gum from gumball machines too. The best gumballs came from the plastic machine at “The Locker Plant” (as we called it) grocery store in Berlin Heights. It cost a penny and was big and soft. The blue ones were my favorite! Another neat gumball machine was at “Shoopies” drug store in Berlin Heights. Although the gumballs were the “small type”, if you got a specially marked gum ball you got free stuff. My memory is a little fuzzy on this, but I think if you got a striped gumball, you got a free 5-cent fountain soda drink, and a speckled one got you a free 10-cent fountain drink. I was always tempted to try chewing on of those specially marked gum to see if they were real gumballs, or just marbles or something. My thirst and getting something free always prevented me from knowing for sure! I guess I’ll never know since “Shoopie” died a few years ago!  The cherry cokes that were mixed were the best!!! Come to think of it, I haven’t noticed the old-fashioned soda water and flavoring syrup being sold anymore anywhere!! Alas, a great American institution seems to have vanished!!! When I was a kid, I always swallowed my gum, and my mother would always warn, “Don’t swallow your gum, it will “gum up” your insides”! I still kept swallowing it and my insides never got gummed up. And since my constant dirty ears never “Grew any potatoes” either, I started to suspect that everything your parents warn you about did not always happen! One interesting “gum incident” was that my Grandmother took a trip to Ireland. One thing she brought back was some Irish gum. It was really good and when I got to the last piece, I couldn’t bear to throw it away, so I actually stuck it to my bedpost and rechewed it for several days! “ABC Gum” is OK if it’s yours!  I did this long before the “Does Your Chewing Gum Loose It’s Flavor on the Bed Post Overnight” song came out. I can vouch for the fact in the song that indeed it does loose its flavor overnight!  Another of my favorite bubble gums was the 3-stick packs with purple-colored sticks from Brownie Daniel’s store. They cost 2-cents and were soft and GOOD! Among some of my most cherished enjoyments in life is the taste a bubble gum when I first start to chew it. It’s ironic that they can put a man on the moon, but they can’t invent bubble gum that holds its entire flavor for the entire duration of the “chew”! Alas, what is this world coming to….???