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Boomer Boner

March 2023
1min read

Then there is the category of the likely legend. Sometimes a popular but mistaken story just seems so comfortably appropriate to the known historical circumstances that it gets accepted without due challenge. An article on the 1889 Oklahoma land rush in our February issue asserted that, among other “firsts” during the boom, “William Wrigley, Jr., rolled his first slab of chewing gum in a tent store at Guthrie.” Now we hear from Robert L. Bridwell, of Norman, Oklahoma, that although this claim has been long and fondly promoted, sometimes in Guthrie itself, there’s no truth in it. The great chewing-gum company has repeatedly pointed out that their founder, neither boomer nor sooner, started his enterprise in Chicago in 1893, and that, further, “he personally never made a stick of gum.” That should give the legend makers, including us, something to chew on for awhile.

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