The "Walter: The Double-Bubble Man" Story

It was an ordinary day. Watching Jeopardy with my wife and one of the categories in Double Jeopardy was "Gum." Pretty neat category and I knew most of the answers. Then the contestant chose the $1,600 answer and it was: the rhyming gum that had a paper cartoon rolled in the wrapper. I yelled out, "Double Bubble." Correct! Then Carol said, "Do you think they heard that?" Then she continued with, "Remember Walter Diemer who lived at Lancashire Terrace when I worked there? He was the one that invented Double Bubble." Oh yes, I remember. The stories Carol would tell me about Walter. In 1996, at the age of 92, he married one the other residents at Lancashire Hall. Florence replaced his first wife, Adelaide, who died 6 years earlier before he moved to the retirement village in Neffsville, PA. She also told me many times about how Walter would create traffic problems while riding his big tricycle around the complex. Walter's tale is an amazing one. Born and raised in Philadelphia, Walter joined the Fleer Company in 1926 as an accountant. The company manufactured candy and gum and the original founder of the company, Frank Henry Fleer, had made a batch of bubble gum in 1906, years before Walter joined the firm, which he called "Blibber Blubber", but it was too sticky and broke too easily. Frank eventually gave up on the idea. Years later, Gilbert Mustin, the company's President, after being called to the phone, asked Walter to watch his batch of bubble gum he was trying to formulate, while he was taking the phone call. Walter was fascinated. Mr. Mustin soon lost interest in making the gum, but Walter didn't. In his free time he would wander to the lab and mix new batches and chew a piece from each batch to see if it blew a good bubble. One day he developed a batch of gum that was soft to chew and blew large bubbles and didn't stick to his face when it burst. Unfortunately it hardened too quickly. He solved that problem by adding latex to the batch. He flavored it with wintergreen, peppermint, vanilla and cinnamon. In December of 1928 he mixed a 300 pound batch of the stuff, only to realize that it had no color. Only coloring he could find in the plant was pink, so the legend of the pink gum was born. He had the batch cut into small pieces and wrapped in paper on the machine used to wrap saltwater taffy. His boss, Mr. Mustin named the gum Dubble Bubble. On December 26 of that year, Walter sent 100 pieces of the new gum to a small candy store at 26 Schedectady Street in Philadelphia. Gum sold for a penny a piece. By the end of the afternoon it had sold out! Gum was so successful that the Fleer Company sold over a million and a half dollars worth of the stuff the next year. Replaced the Tootsie Roll as the best-selling one-cent candy. Walter was a success, but the one thing he forgot to do after inventing Double Bubble: patent it! He never received any royalties for his invention which could have made him a billionaire; a Double Bubble Billionaire! He said his reward was seeing all the happy children chewing his gum. In 1970, after being the senior vice-president of the company and a member of the board of Directors, Walter retired. Walter and his first wife, Adelaide, moved to Ocean City, New Jersey. In 1986, both of his children died (I cannot find any cause for their unfortunate deaths). Shortly after his wife's death in 1990, he moved to Lancashire Terrace Retirement Village in Neffsville, PA where my wife was the secretary, and the rest is history as they say. I met Walter a few times and can still visualize him riding his tricycle around the streets of the village with a pocket full of Double Bubble, handing it out to anyone that wanted a piece. Brought back memories chewing away on the stuff. It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy. PS - pixs from the top: Walter Diemer with a box of his invention, original Fleer ad, eventual logo for Double Bubble.