Life Blows Up. (Lucky Guy.)

By Rick Horowitz

It didn't have to be pink.

That's the thing you need to remember: It didn't have to be pink. It could have been red. It could have been green. It could have been mauve, puce or chartreuse -- assuming they had mauve, puce or chartreuse back then.

Back then being 1928, when bubble gum was invented. Invented by a man named Walter E. Diemer, who died the other day at 93. Walter E. Diemer, the obituaries say, invented bubble gum.

Pink just happened to be around when it happened.

You never thought much about bubble gum being invented, did you? That's not quite true: You never thought at all about bubble gum being invented. Bubble gum was simply there, like noise, like clouds. Or maybe it evolved, like frogs, or fell from the trees, like peaches. Wrong.

Bubble gum was invented. Of course, it was an accident.

But don't take my word for it. Here's what Walter Diemer, the inventor himself, said about it just a year or two before he died: "It was an accident." (See?)

Isn't that always the way? So many of mankind's great advances -- penicillin, Teflon, "America's Funniest Home Videos" -- are nothing more than accidents, mistakes turned into gold. (Or, in this case, pink.) It simply takes someone to notice, to grasp the vast potential. Walter Diemer grasped.

"I was doing something else," Mr. Diemer explained, "and ended up with something with bubbles." And history took one giant pop forward.

What Mr. Diemer was supposed to be doing, back in 1928, was working as an accountant for the Fleer Chewing Gum Company in Philadelphia; what he wound up doing in his spare time was playing around with new gum recipes. Chewing gum had been on the scene for more than half a century -- you put it in your mouth, you chewed it, it stayed in your mouth. End of story.

But this latest brew of Walter Diemer's was -- unexpectedly, crucially -- different. It was less sticky than regular chewing gum. It also stretched more easily. Walter Diemer, 23 years old, saw the bubbles. He saw the possibilities.

One day, the obits say, he carried a five-pound glop of the stuff to a grocery store; it sold out in a single afternoon. Before long, the folks at Fleer were marketing Diemer's creation at a penny per, and Diemer himself was teaching cheeky salesmen to blow bubbles, to demonstrate exactly what made this gum different from all other gums.

Dubble Bubble, they called it. It bestrode the bubble-gum landscape unchallenged for years, at least until Bazooka came along to share the wealth. Walter Diemer stayed with Fleer for decades, eventually becoming a senior vice president.

He never received royalties for his invention, his wife told the newspapers, but he didn't seem to mind; knowing what he'd created was reward enough. Sometimes he'd invite a bunch of kids to the house and tell them the story of his wonderful, accidental invention. Then he'd hold bubble-blowing contests for them.

"He was terrifically proud of it," his wife explained. "He would say to me: `I've done something with my life. I've made kids happy around the world.'" How many people can make that claim?

But pink? Why pink? A quirk of fate -- and a good thing, too. (Think about it: Isn't "bubblegum music" the absolutely perfect name for "bubblegum music"? But what if bubble gum were gray? No way!)

Bubble gum is pink, boys and girls, because when the big moment arrived, when destiny came calling on Walter Diemer, pink was the one and only shade of food coloring he had nearby. Not red, not green, not mauve or puce or chartreuse. He reached for pink. He poured.

And destiny grinned ear to ear.

1/13/98