Cocktail Time

Yonks ago, this blog was born as a way to examine all sorts of oddities and curiosities associated with Topps Chewing Gum, often by peeking at the wizards behind the curtain, or passing along information I had gathered during various research forays. Since then I have occasionally looked at Bowman cards, reasoning since Topps had bought the company in 1956 it was a combined history. 

I still think of it that way but Bowman has their own past and were the dominant player in the bubble gum field when Topps launched Bazooka in 1947. At some semi-distant point I plan to start dissecting their predecessor company, Gum, Inc. which was famously the issuer of many classic sets in the 1930's and very early 40's, and in many ways far more wilder and woolier than Bowman.  That is going to take gobs of research though. 

Bowman was well-organized compared to Topps, and their releases were generally quite orderly, whereas Gum, Inc.'s approach was very much the opposite. Both companies were the on-and-off playthings of J. Warren Bowman, known as Warren to everybody. He was an eccentric and brash big thinker and fearless entrepreneur, who sometimes saw his dreams realized, sometimes not. I profiled the man in issue #316 of The Wrapper if you want to search a copy out; he was quite an interesting cat.

After eleven years of incorporation and some fights with his Board that once got him briefly ousted from his own company, Warren Bowman renamed Gum, Inc. as Bowman Gum, Inc. He did this right in the middle of hostilities with the Axis Powers, on August 6, 1943 to be exact. But a year before that, he came up with this; thanks to BFF o' the Archive Jeff Shepherd for the scans:

I assume "flavorits" were chiclet like, maybe without the candy coating.  

The reverse indicia is hard on the eyes, isn't it?

But if you blow up the words, you get Gum, Inc. with a 1942 copyright; this chew being possibly their last product but, as seen above, bearing the Bowman name. So this certainly seems transitional:

The war had constricted all sorts of manufacturing and food supplies and Warren Bowman publicly vowed to stop selling bubble gum for the duration, but not, as it turned out, good old chewing gum. I suspect he couldn't get enough raw materials to produce bubble gum and just spun it into positive PR. He came up with other products to market and also sold various confections to the U.S. military as he bobbed and weaved, as did many firms during the war. I suspect the Bowman's Fruit Chewing Gum was discontinued quickly, as eight months before the corporate name change, he had copyrighted three chewing gum wrappers: Fruit (hold that thought), Cinnamon, and Spearmint. 

All three of these had their copyrights registered on December 17, 1942, as submitted by Gum, Inc., barely a year after Pearl Harbor. We see the Fruit flavor above, of course, but it's not clear to me if Gum, Inc. ever managed to scrape enough supplies together to manufacture the other two flavors. Why?  Well, in 1943 Warren Bowman pivoted once he had completed his reincorporation and, while he sold three chewing gum flavors, he only offered two chewing gums. Fruit Cocktail was one, marketed as Warren's but manufactured, as per the indicia, in 1943 by the newly-formed Bowman Gum, Inc. (and noting I have found scattered references to Warren-Bowman Gum, Inc. around this time and into at least 1947 as well):

"Fruit" being in quotes confirms the artificiality mentioned on the wrapper; there were no natural fruit flavors used. That could be why the quotation-mark-free Bowman's Fruit Chewing Gum didn't carry on. 

Fruit Cocktail was an "adult" chew, as was Cin-A-Mint, another 1943 concoction that was a portmanteau in both name and taste:

There wasn't much else marketed by Bowman before the end of the war, understandably so, given the state of the conflict and paucity of manufacturing supplies.

1945 brought an elegant and refined redesign, now a little more Art Deco inspired I'd say, to Fruit Cocktail, plus some actual fruit, as the flavor was no longer limited by the use of quotes; even the apostrophe in Warren's was gone in a total purge of packaging punctuation marks; this likely postdates V-J Day then:

As longtime readers here know, for decades chewing gum was primarily marketed as an after dinner breath freshener, or a quick sop after night out with the boys. Wrigley's was king, American Chicle the sprightly prince and almost everybody else in the game was an earl or viscount at best. Below that were the serfs like Topps and under that, if you solely made bubble-gum: the jesters. Bowman wanted a place at the royal chewing gum dais, but ending the war and having enough raw materials on hand to accomplish this were entirely different things for about eighteen months after Japan surrendered. So instead, Warrens bagged the cinnamon and came out with Mint Cocktail (and a lot of hyperbole) in 1947; we'll run into the "one and only" line again in a Philadelphia second:

Breathtaking, but really breath-making, right? Maybe it tasted like a Grasshopper, I dunno. Cin-A-Mint seemed squarely aimed at grown ups, but Bowman was sending out mixed messages by the end of the war with Mint Cocktail. A series of magazine ads used a number of actors to push the product:  Lana Turner and Van Heflin were the favored movie stars and the series also included Lady Iris Mountbatten, a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria and very much of so-called royal lineage. So the adult audience was covered but the ads also featured Margaret O'Brien, who was a child:

They had previously made a play for the tweens and teens with the Art Deco-ed version of Mint Cocktail, as this awesome 1945 ad that obviously features a caricature of Frank Sinatra shows. The Sultan of Swoon was at that time melting the, um, hearts of bobby-soxers across the country:

 

You can see how that the "one and only" wording predates 1947. Other means of advertising also mixed the grownups and the kids together. Take this matchbook, which would have been cigarette machine and bar-top fodder for sure:

Not so fast, bub; check out the interior:

Then there was a series of ads for Mint Cocktail that they placed in the comics sections of the Sunday papers, starting around the end of 1945; these were aimed at a wide audience:

In case you're wondering, the Kentucky Colonel varietal is the traditional name of the herb used in mint juleps and spearmint food flavorings. So the mint angle was covered by the colonel in both 1945 and then again 1947, now with the newer packaging highlighted:

Meanwhile, cinnamon seems to have just gone poof and as for Fruit Cocktail, I can't find a 1947 redesign into the classic stick format, and Bowman may have simply held it back as the flavorings were probably similar to that of their back-in-production bubble gum. We'll get into their pink bubbly stuff sometime soon, and I'm not full of Blony when I say that!