Sunday Rerun: On Further Review

Do they even still sell Baby Ruth candy bars? I know they sold a ton of them when I was a bicycle riding, Coke swigging, candy bar munching ball of energy. I was not for the Baby Ruths at all. I liked the Snickers and the Mars bars so much, I invested some stray dollars in a nougat mine out West, but it didn't pay off. The miners didn't take the right kind of drill with them.

But the name of the Baby Ruth candy bar was always questioned. Most people just assumed that the candy company ripped off the name of the Baltimore-born Yankee slugger Babe Ruth, whose popularity zoomed in the early 1920s.

At that same time, the Curtiss Candy Company in Chicago had a treat called the Kandy Kake that wasn't selling so well, so they changed the recipe to a chocolate-covered peanut-caramel-nougat bar and changed the name to Baby Ruth. 

And within five years, Curtiss was selling a million dollars worth a month, a nickel a throw. The money was coming in so fast that the company hired airplane pilots to fly around dropping thousands of Baby Ruth bars from their planes, with little parachutes to guide them to earth and the waiting hands of hoi polloi.

Back in New York, Babe Ruth noticed all this commerce and decided he wanted a slice of the candy, so he put out a bar called "Ruth's Home Run Candy." The Curtiss people said hold on a second here: our lawyers can spot copyright infringement a thousand miles away, and anyway, our candy bar is not named for you, but for President Grover Cleveland's oldest daughter, Ruth.

And that would have been much more believable had not Baby Ruth Cleveland been born in 1891, thirty years before the candy bar. Not only that: Baby Ruth was not even alive anymore; she died of diphtheria in 1904.

So it would seem that claiming they named the candy bar after a baby born three decades before was stretching the truth a little. Stretching is ok... if you're a Bonomo's Turkish Taffy. 

And that taffy has nothing to with the nation of Turkey whatsoever.

Maybe I'll switch to Clark Bars and claim to have invented them!