Gum Balls

For a penny, we couldn't lose.

The familiar glass globe stood on a one-legged stand in a prominent place and kids were predictably drawn to it. There were thousands of them all over America. I never had to go very far to see one and if I had a penny I would be drawn over to it, put a penny in the slot and get a gumball, chewing gum in a candied shell: a green one or a red one or a white one or a purple one...Another bonanza for dentists.

The manufacturer of gumballs must have had a huge profit ratio. I guess his cost was about a penny per hundred. Millions of gumballs were shipped to the outposts: to drug stores, to five-and-tens, to soda fountains. Kids didn't stand in line at the gumball machine but there always seemed to be a steady trickle of countless thousands of children putting pennies into the slot, cranking it, and with each turn getting a gumball.

Gumballs were mouth-marbles. Usually they weren't quite as hard as marbles, or jawbreakers. If I walked by a gumball machine and had a few pennies, they'd go into the slot. I'd chew one and put the others in my pocket, a little quarry full of junk. I might chew another one later or trade it for something that one of my pals had in his quarry. It's funny. There were times when a bunch of us would empty pockets to compare treasures (things recently found) and trades might be made. At the end of the day, these things would end up on the desk or the chest of drawers.

Gaming laws didn't filter down to gumball machines. Among the blue and yellow and other colored chewies were a few winners. If one of these speckled or gold colored spheres rolled down the shute it could be worth a nickel or a dime...big stakes. Legally they would be traded for a candy bar or something.

Store-owners weren't supposed to give winners a nickel or a dime for the prize-ball that rolled down the shute, but some winked at the law that put the gumballs in dangerous company with one armed bandits and punch-boards and other games of chance. The cops could be mean and swoop down on gamblers and haul them away in handcuffs.

I never heard about ten year olds being cuffed. The thought of raids kept proprietors discreet about who might win a dime when the prize-ball rolled out of the globe. After all, the police might send an undercover midget in to set up the owners of a mom-and pop store for a fall. So the usual reward would be for the kid to pick up some kind of candy-bar off the rack.

The thrill of winning is irrepressible. Some people handle it very nicely. It's a matter of stride. Often, winning is imagined to be worth a gamble. That's relative to what you have and how much you can afford to throw-away. Gumballs were different than one-armed bandits and punchboards and "numbers" and lotteries and bingo. Put up your penny and if you lose the grand prize you still get what you paid for in the first place, a ball of gum to chew on for a while.

Winning was gumball dreams, something different than prizes found in cereal boxes or down in the cracker-jacks. Those were expected presents. They were announced on the box. "Inside, a free framfroid." The makers of gumballs could afford to be generous. Their little customers, seeing the speckled bait, knew they had a chance to get something for nothing and that tempted them to part with a penny or two that might have gone to something else: a licorice pipe, a Tootsie Roll, a Mars Bar. If they won, it would probably go to those things anyway: a Baby Ruth, a Hershey Bar, red licorice. Either way, the globe full of candy-coated gum was an introduction to syndicated gambling.

The rich, who live in Buzzards Bay or Chestnut Hill or Newport got their money from widely disparate endeavors. Some were tycoons, inventors, brokers, railroad magnates, retailers. Among them in the flocks of millionaires is an honest guy who made gumballs and sold them at the lowest price imaginable. None of his customers complained of being short-changed.